Epilogue
by Fishielicious
Summary: Left disfigured and detached, Sirius tries to get his act together. Sequel to The Life You Lose.
1. Chapter 1

The morning the sentence was handed down, I was in the courtroom. The morning before, I had been sentenced to six months probation, which was, as everyone knew, a slap on the wrist.

That morning, the morning after I was sentenced, I was back in court at 8:00 am, having only been released from the Ministry jail the previous afternoon.

I hadn't talked to him since the Death Eaters hit me in the back through the middle of a crowd, after I'd tried to bring him to my flat barely conscious. By the time we got to trial, it had been almost two months since that day.

People told me he saved my life. James pointed out that he was the one who'd put it at risk in the first place, but even James had to admit, eventually, that Regulus acted pretty heroically. That admission was a long time coming, considering James had also been convicted of aiding and abetting (on Regulus's account, as he saw it).

When we walked into the courtroom, me first, then James and Lily, her hand fluttering around her lower belly though it looked like she might have just had a big lunch, our parents were among the first people I saw. They stood near the front, my father leaning on a cane, his shoulders bowed with weakness or nerves. My mother was attached to his side, taller than he was with her back straight and her modest heels. She had him by the elbow, and the lower he sagged, the taller she stood.

I stopped when I saw them. I was glad they were there, in a way, for Regulus. This wasn't phony love. They wouldn't have been there if they didn't love him. They would have never been there for me, if I had embarrassed them like that. But, Regulus was always more lovable than I was.

James whispered in my ear, "Ignore them."

But they were sitting in the row right behind where Regulus would sit. Which is where I was gong to sit. Lily saw what the arrangements were and pushed James in the row first, and pulled me in behind her. So when the courtroom came to order, my mother and I were sitting on opposite ends of the same bench. It was the closest I'd been to them in years.

Lily kept putting her hand on mine, and I kept moving it to scratch my nose or brush my hair out of my face.

Then they brought Regulus in. He looked like our father, hunched over. His eyes were vacant and faraway. I was used to how he always rolled them and how his eyebrows never stayed still. But he seemed okay. James told me sometimes people came in mumbling, like they'd already lost it.

I pulled my hand out of Lily's again and chewed the nail off my index finger. Somewhere to my side, I heard a little cough transparently covering a sob. I didn't look over.

I don't know what I was hoping. That they would look at how he had risked his own life more than once and saved mine, too. It wasn't like I didn't know the bad things he did, but I mean. I didn't know what I thought he deserved. I don't know what it was I was expecting. I looked down and found myself squeezing Lily's hand so tight our knuckles were turning white.

The whole process lasted about ten minutes, most of which consisted of formalities. When it was over, they sentenced him to twenty years in Azkaban.

Before they took him away again, I got to hug him, after Mum and Dad. I wrapped my arms around his shoulders and pressed my palms across his body. He put his hands on my waist. His touch was light. I squeezed him till I felt his sticky rib bones poke into my torso. He touched me like he was hugging an unloved aunt who smelled like cat piss.

I said, "Bye. I love you. I'll visit. I'm sorry. I'll write." Things like that. I don't think he said anything. I tried to look him in the eyes, but he turned away.

On the way home, I thought of life without him. Lily didn't want me Apparating. She had James borrow a Ministry car. I had been staying with them, anyway.

Regulus and I hadn't been close since I was eleven and went to Hogwarts. When I ran away from home, I didn't particularly think about him, either way. When I found out he had become a Death Eater, which I had always suspected he would, anyway, it was easy to disown him as I had my parents. In my defense, I was sure he had done the same for me. It was so easy to forget one brother when I already had another.

In the front seat, James cursed at another driver and Lily laughed and told him to blow the horn.

When he came to my flat that night, I hadn't missed Regulus in a long time. I was a bit drunk, too, and I might've hurt him or turned him over to the Aurors if things had gone a little different.

But he'd reminded me of how he'd been as a little boy. And maybe he reminded me of myself. I always wanted to be like James, but naturally, I was more like Regulus. He had a bend for the morose and a sullen self-doubt totally alien to James but uncomfortably familiar to me. Regulus reminded me of what I could have been. I needed to help him.

We had only spent a matter of days together. Less than a week out of five years on hostile terms. Out of ten years barely speaking to each other before that. My life, without Regulus, would not change. Less than a week was forgettable. Maybe a few months, a year at most, and I would forget the whole thing ever happened. Lily would have the baby, and I would have a niece or nephew. Regulus would be in prison twenty years. It would be easy to forget him. What else could I do? Less than one week and all that time.

In the courtroom, I said, "I love you." I didn't know if I knew him enough to love him.

When we got back to James and Lily's-the Potters'-house, I offered to help Lily make lunch. She laughed at me and fell down on the sofa. "No, we'll carry-out." I sat down next to her and she put her arms around me. "I'm sorry, Sirius." I relaxed into her and pressed my face in the crook of her neck. Lily was going to make a wonderful mother.

I said, "You're going to make a wonderful mother."

James sat down on my other side and put his hand on my head. That was the only part of me not wrapped up in Lily's arms. "Do you want anything for lunch?"

I could tell he already had the telephone in his other hand.

"Oh, James." Lily loosened her grip, and I sat up. James's hand fell to my shoulder.

"Yeah. What are you ordering?"

That evening, James and Lily settled down to watch a film. Some muggle thing. Lily loved them and James had become a fan against his will. I didn't mind them. There was a certain appeal in the novelty. There wasn't anything bad to be said about the medium. I had nothing negative to say about the cinema.

But I went to my room, anyway. Lily and James had been unhesitant. They offered me a room as soon as I got out of jail. I'm sure they'd been planning to put me up as soon as I landed in St. Mungo's. I was in the nursery. It was already painted pale mint green and James had pushed the cot off into a corner. I was sleeping on a mattress unmoored from the wall, because James insisted he was going to add a second coat of paint to the walls. It seemed adrift, floating in the middle of the room, like sleeping on a boat.

There is something I didn't tell you earlier. Dumbledore had been in court that morning. The whole time. Afterwards I followed him. I wanted to know how he could have let this happen. He said it was all he could do to keep him from being given a life sentence. I told him twenty years _was _life. Regulus was nineteen years old. Twenty years was more than life. I asked why we'd ever bothered to trust him. I should've taken Regulus out of the country. Regulus would probably die in there. They were starving him. He wasn't eating, I could tell. In with all those Death Eaters. This was his fault. This was on him. Dumbledore didn't say anything to that, and around that time James caught up with me and led me away.

I stripped down to my pants and climbed into bed. The bed was piled high with blankets and pillows, but the pillows kept falling of the back because of the unmoored mattress.

It wasn't all Dumbledore's fault. It's true he'd never promised us anything, and I was sure it was his influence that kept me out of Azkaban and let James go free before his sentencing. But I knew what happened meant Dumbledore thought Regulus deserved prison. Deserved twenty years in prison. The time in my head was insurmountable. Lily and James's child would be a full grown adult by the time he got out.

I fell asleep after about ten minutes. It seemed like a long time to think, but I didn't toss and turn.

* * *

The next day I went to an appointment with Lily.

"It's silly how many of these I have to go to," she said, but even as she did, she put her hand protectively on her belly. "You can come in with me. They're going to show me the fetus."

I thought about staying in the waiting room and reading magazines, but I didn't want to offend Lily. She would be hurt if I didn't want to see the baby.

The Healer asked where James was. Lily laughed and said he was at work, and that he had pouted for ages about not being able to come. I was glad the woman knew Lily and James and didn't think I was the father.

She rubbed a load of jelly over Lily's stomach and her womb became visible inside. I leaned over. The little pink ball inside her was bald, with alien pupilless eyes and tiny curled fingers.

"He's a boy," Lily said. "I just haven't told James yet, and you better not, either." She craned her neck, trying to see inside her own belly.

I leaned back and looked away. The whole thing was a bit gruesome. I felt like I was intruding on something private. I could wait until the baby came into this world properly to meet him. Him. A boy.

When we came back home, James was already there. He'd taken off work early. He did that a lot. He didn't really need to work all the time.

"I hoped I'd be able to meet you, but I was late. What did the Healer say?" James asked. "I made sandwiches." He and Lily sat down on the sofa. I sat in the bay window across from them.

"She said everything looks great."

I looked out the window so I didn't have to see James and Lily beam at each other. Probably snog. The day was clear and the ground was brown and crunchy, trees bare. Winter had happened quickly.

"What kind of sandwiches?" Lily's voice lilted, like it only did sometimes when she was talking to James. Back in school, her voice used to be hard and sardonic when she spoke to him. And his would crack and waver. Now he had this deep, quiet voice he used with her. When they were sitting together. Now, when he spoke, I couldn't even hear him. I watched a bird the same color as the ground hopping around, turning up piles of leaves.

"Sirius, are you hungry? James made sandwiches. Or so he claims." She giggled, and I heard, if not saw, him kiss her on the forehead.

"I think I should move back home," I said. I turned away from the window.

"What are you talking about?" Lily's mouth was open, her face pink.

"This seems like a comment on my cooking skills." James grinned.

"It's only been two days! Less than that, even."

"Sirius, you lived with my family for two years."

"One-and-a-half. And I felt bad about that, as well. I mean, you're about to have a baby, I just can't-"

"Sirius, you're staying." Now, Lily's face was white. She sat on the edge of the sofa, back straight. James put his arm around hers.

"Lily, I know you're about to be a mother, and maybe that makes you want to mother me, but I'm a grown man, and I can take care of myself. I should take care of myself."

"I'm not mothering you, you berk. I'm trying to be your friend. Your brother-"

"Lily-"

"Fuck off, James. Your brother, whom you love, is going to prison for twenty years, and you-"

"Lily, let's get lunch ready." James stood up and pulled Lily to her feet.

"You don't have to do that," I said. "James. I know Regulus is in Azkaban. And I know what's happened to me. So." I felt the blood rising to my skin. "Well, fuck it. Let's have some damn sandwiches."

* * *

After lunch, I sat at the kitchen counter, where the best lighting in the house was. Lily sat across from me.

Her thin fingertips slid under my bandages and peeled them off gingerly.

"It's not so bad," I said, "you could just yank them off."

"Maybe it's my mothering instinct." The corners of her lips curled.

When the bandages were off, she picked up the tube of ointment and squeezed it onto her fingers.

"I could probably do this myself," I said.

"But I'm a Healer, you know," she said. "I do it better."

"Trainee Healer," I said. The ointment always stung for a while, and I had to clench my fingernails tight in my fists while she unrolled the fresh gauze bandages. I was due back at St. Mungo's in a few days. Apparently at this stage, infection was a big risk. I felt like I was dealing with Muggles, sometimes. Infection? It seemed like something a bezoar should be able to cure. I mumbled this opinion to Lily between my teeth, and she laughed, widely.

"If it gets infected, we can fix it," she said, hooking the metal clasp that held the bandages together through and patting it into place, "but we need to catch the infection before your flesh starts rotting off." She laughed again.

"I don't think that's so funny." I stretched out my fingers as the burning sensation of the ointment faded away.

"Don't worry, your flesh won't rot off." She put her hand on my shoulder.

* * *

That night, James and I went down the pub.

"We ought to invite Moony and Wormy," James said, "soon. Sometime."

"Yeah, you could invite them if you want. I mean, I'd like to see them."

"Yeah. Soon." James waved to get the barman's attention. "Could we have a couple of pints over here?"

"And whiskey." I held up three fingers. James grinned. "When was the last time you saw Remus and Peter, anyway?" I asked as the barman poured our whiskies, dribbling puddles between the glasses.

"Not for a couple of weeks, now. Remus maybe even longer."

"Me neither," I said. Beer soaked the bandages under my bottom lip.

"At least Pete keeps in touch." James traced the lip of his glass with his finger. "I've not got so much as an owl from Remus."

"Well, he's quite busy, I reckon. Converting werewolves all over Europe."

"You reckon he's having much luck?"

"I have no idea, but then. He won't like to talk to me about that, anyway."

James looked like he wanted to argue, but just sighed and put his arm around my shoulders. "Well, we'll invite them next time."

Lily had begged off this evening, saying she was tired and wanted to rest up for next evening, when they were having Alice and Frank Longbottom over, but I knew it was because she wouldn't be able to drink and that made her angry.

"So, dinner party with Frank and Alice tomorrow," I said.

"Yeah."

I finished off my whiskey. "Seems so grown up." I tried to smile, but the whiskey made my mouth pucker.

"You're friends with Frank and Alice, too."

"I was. Before the four of you were all married and having couples' get togethers."

"It's just a couple of friends coming over."

"Isn't Alice pregnant too, now?"

"Yeah. Well, so what?"

The light in the pub was fuzzy yellow, glowing and warm. The bar was warm and smooth. I could feel the cold breeze from the cracks in the doorframe against my back. "I think I have plans tomorrow night," I said.

* * *

I went to the Ministry the next day to see about the possibility of visiting Regulus. I knew that no matter how busy Lily really was, she would pretend she wasn't and insist on coming with me. For moral support. Lily was big on moral support these days.

So I told her I was going to run some unspecified errands. As though I could have errands to run.

The witch at the Justice Ministry window seemed accommodating until she realized I was on probation myself, and that I'd been convicted with Regulus.

"Can you imagine that we'd let that happen? Just imagine if we had Death Eaters visiting Death Eaters in Azkaban." She clapped her quill down on the half-completed paperwork on her desk. Her jaw hung open.

"But I'm not a Death Eater," I said. I took a deep breath and straightened my back. "If I were, don't you think they wouldn't have sent me to Azkaban, too?"

"That's for the courts to decide."

"So you really think, if the Wizengamot thought I was dangerous-"

"Look, I'm not here to make judgments about whether you're dangerous." She looked me up and down with a critical eye. "I'm just here to tell you the policy, which is that convicted criminals are not allowed to visit inmates in Azkaban."

"Stop calling me a criminal, okay?" I tried to unclench my jaw.

"Are you even aware there's a war on?"

I pulled my bandages away from my face. "Does it look like I'm aware?"

I apologized once I realized I was shouting. The Justice Ministry witch seemed to feel sorry for me after that. I had ripped some of the fledgling scabs off my face, and the blood was soaking through the bandages, and on my fingers. She told me to come back in six months. I didn't know what to do but leave. I was getting blood everywhere.

* * *

I went to my flat to clean myself up. It smelled musty and dank, like it had been shut up for years. I was late with rent. The landlord had slipped a note under the door, but the wording was still quite polite. Before I left, I would put the money is his mail drop.

I washed off my face in the w.c., but it wouldn't really stop bleeding properly, and I'd forgotten I didn't have any fresh dressings at my flat, or that ointment.

If the wound weren't magical, it would've healed long before now. It had been months, and still, a scab could barely form.

"But they have been forming," Lily would always say, with perennial cheer, when I worried that my face would always look like this.

I packed up the rest of my clothes and a few books, got an envelope together for Mr. Bantham, and headed back to James and Lily's.

There were still a few hours before the dinner party. As I had anticipated, Lily was beside herself when she saw my face. I confessed where I had gone earlier. "I lost my temper at the Justice Department witch," I said, twisting my fingers together as Lily swabbed the ointment into the deep lesions. "It's good I hurt myself instead of her, though." She pressed my lips shut with the cotton swab, so I couldn't laugh.

"You wouldn't have hurt her," she said. She cradled the back of my head with her other hand.

I leaned into her hand and relaxed my head back so she could get at my neck with the ointment.

"Well, we can try talking to other people. James can talk to his parents' Ministry friends. Maybe Dumbledore could help."

"You know, maybe it's a good thing I can't see him." I stared up at the white ceiling. Everything in the Potters' house was new, fresh, and bright. No cracks in the ceiling, no dark cobwebbed corners.

"What do you mean?" She tilted my chin down and began unrolling the dressings.

"I don't know. He won't be the same. In there. I don't know how it will be. And it's twenty years. What will we even talk about? We barely know each other."

Lily didn't say anything. She just "hmmmed". I squirmed in my seat, and she pinched my arm and told me to stay still. When she was done, she kissed me on the forehead and sent me out for wine and cheese, since I'd set her back in her schedule.

I brought the bottles back and uncorked one for Lily and me. Mostly for me, but Lily had a glass. "It can't hurt the baby every once in a while," she said, or alternatively, "He'll have to deal with things more dangerous than a drink or two soon enough."

"I know what you think," I said to her, slicing pieces of apple to go with the cheese.

"About what? Everything?" She took a very dainty sip of wine.

"Nothing, really. Just that I'm selfish."

"You're not always. You're just acting that way now; I don't know why. Do you think I could drink another glass, or?"

"I think I'm going to skip dinner, if that's okay," I said, putting down the knife to pour myself another glass.

"I suppose the couple's evening might not be your cup of tea."

"James pretended he didn't get that."

Lily smiled and patted my hand. "He just wants you around all the time. He doesn't ever want you to leave."

"I'm lucky, I know." I smiled and scratched the back of my neck.

"You are." She laughed. Then the doorbell rang.

* * *

I went out the back door with Lily's blessing. I decided to head to the pub, just to collect my thoughts and make a plan.

"Pint and three fingers?" The barman asked when I sat down.

I nodded. "Reckon it must be easy to remember me."

"You're Sirius right? Lily and James's friend?" He wiped down the bar in front of me before setting down my pint and whiskey.

"I am. But that's not why it's easy to remember me, is it?"

He laughed. "It's only part of it. Where are Lily and James, anyway? How is she coming along?"

"Well. They're having a dinner party tonight."

"My name's Ed," he said and stuck out his hand.

"Nice to meet you." I finished my whiskey and started on the beer.

"The next one's on the house," he said.

"Thank you. Why?" I wiped my mouth with the back of my arm. "Bad form to look a gift-horse in the mouth, I suppose. Are Lily and James such good customers?"

"Good people, too. James mentioned he had a brother who was having a real hard time. I take it you're the brother."

"I am."

"Well, that's what the drink's for. James talks about you a lot. It's a 'feel better soon' drink."

I laughed. "Okay. Thank you."

"So, did the Potters adopt you? James called you his brother, but sometimes he just called you his friend, too."

"Er. In a manner of speaking. I lived with his family when I was a teenager." I took a long drink of my beer and looked down at my fingernails. I did not much want to talk to Ed anymore, but it seemed rude to ignore him after he'd just offered me a round on the house. And he was apparently such good friends with James and Lily. I just hoped the pub would get busier soon.

* * *

By the time I reckoned it was safe to go back to Lily and James's, it was the small hours of the morning, and I was drunk.

* * *

When I woke up, I was still a bit drunk. I opened my eyes and tried to focus on the ceiling, but there were no cracks. Nothing to focus on. I rolled over and looked out the window. It was raining. It was Saturday. James would be home all day. I wanted to spend an entire day with him, together every moment, like we used to do. I wanted him to be hungover, too, to crawl into my room at 2:00 in the afternoon moaning and swearing he'd never drink again.

"I think I need to see my parents," I said, finding James reading the news on the sofa.

"You should have a cup of coffee first," Lily said. She came up behind me and pushed the back of my head with her palm.

"Ouch, Lily."

"Excuse me." James dropped the _Prophet_ on his lap. "You want to see _whom_?"

"I don't want to. I didn't say I wanted to. I think I need to."

"Why?"

"Look. The Justice Department won't let me see Regulus."

"We're gong to work that out. They'll be flexible."

"Holy shit, you're such a bureaucrat all of a sudden." I was even surprised, how loud my voice came out. "Throwing your influence around. I might as well be talking to my parents right now. It won't work. I can't see him, but my parents can. I'm sure they have."

James didn't say anything.

"I'm an adult now. I can act civilly. I can handle it."

"What do you think you're going to get out of this? What could they possibly tell you? You want to know how Regulus is doing? Shit, I'll tell you. Not fucking well. He's reliving all the worst moments of his life all the time. He's probably starving himself. He's probably sick. His wounds are probably infected, his broken bones haven't been set right. And he's not going to get any medical treatment. That's how he's doing. There. Are you happy?"

"You think I don't know all that already? You think I'm so stupid?"

"Then why do you need to see your parents?"

"Because they're my parents, James. Mine and Regulus's. We're his family."

"They're just going to tell you it's your fault." James looked like he wanted to stand up, but I put my hand on his shoulder and sat down beside him. "They're going to tell you it's your fault Regulus is in Azkaban and that he's going to die there because of you. Do you really want to hear that?"

"Well, I just heard it from you."

James turned to me, his face just inches from mine. "You know I don't think that."

I faced front and looked out the window. "But you have thought of it. And so have I. I know what they'll say to me; I've said it to myself."

"You're just trying to punish yourself. You're wallowing."

I shook my head. I didn't know what to say to him.

"I'll go see him, then."

I laughed. "You're a criminal too now, you know." I looked back at him and he was kind of smiling. "Thank you," I said. "For the Polyjuice. For trusting Regulus, for coming up with that plan."

He punched me in the arm. "Are you joking? Lily can go visit him."

"Lily doesn't have anything to say to him." I picked at my cuticles. "I can't even think of sending her there, pregnant. I don't know if dementors can affect a fetus."

James didn't say anything, but he kind of nodded hypnotically.

"Well, I'll go see them tomorrow." I settled back into the sofa.

James didn't argue.

I fell asleep, and when I woke up, I could hear James and Lily in the kitchen, laughing, and metal dishes clanging.

* * *

The next day, I got up thinking I was going back to Grimmauld Place.

But it was harder to do that to think of. First thing in the morning, I volunteered to go to the shop to get groceries for Lily. There was something satisfying about the butcher shop and the sound the cleaver made coming down on the butcher block.

When I went to the market and walked down the long aisles, it became hard to focus. The items on Lily's list weren't close together, and I went down a few aisles more than once, doubling back and forth over the list. I kept having to bring the list back up to my eye, letting it run over Lily's small handwriting.

I had just come out of the store, holing two shopping bags in my hands, when someone called my name.

I put the bags down on the ground and turned.

"Hi." Rosier was striding across the car park with his hand already out.

I took a step back, but when he reached for my hand, I let him take it.

"How are you?" His smile never faltered. There was a shiny scar running the length of his face. It was faded and looked old, but I knew it hadn't been there before. It had to have happened within the past year.

"What do you want?" I nudged the shopping bags behind me and put my hand in my pocket, around my wand.

"I want to talk to you. How is your-" He gestured at my face, "doing?"

"Fine."

"Good. I just wanted to talk to you about Regulus." Rosier tilted his head up to meet my gaze. He squinted in the cloudy sunlight. His scar glinted and his red curls shone.

"What about him?"

"Let's have lunch." His shark smile opened wider, showing rows of white teeth.

"No."

"I think we both want to keep this civil. I'll pay."

I felt a raindrop fall on my cheekbone. My first thought was that I couldn't let the groceries get wet.

At the diner down the street, I ordered a pint and Rosier ordered blood sausage and a salad.

"my interest is practical," Rosier said, slicing a cherry tomato with his canines. "I know he's not doing well." He rolled his eyes. A seed was stuck to his lip. "And I know you can't see him. I was there, in court, when he was sentenced." He smiled. "I saw you there."

"Right." I swallowed a big gulp of beer. "What does practical mean?"

"Well, it's when-"

"Shut the fuck up and answer the question."

"I'm just trying to be friendly." He stared down at his plate and carved his sausage into tiny bites. "I'm here because I want to help Regulus."

I flagged down the waitress and ordered another pint.

"But you're not done with the first one," she said. Her ponytail bobbed side to side. Rosier laughed.

"I'll worry about that." I finished my beer while Rosier finished chewing the bite of sausage in his mouth.

"We've been friends since we were eleven. Even before," Rosier continued. "Of course I want to help him."

"Funny, most of his friends since he was eleven want to kill him." I intercepted the second pint before the waitress could put it on the table. "Thank you."

"Are you accusing me of something?" Rosier smiled with a cheek full of blood sausage.

"I didn't say anything." I took a long swig of my beer.

Rosier's big smile twisted. "I love him more than you do, you know."

"Maybe you do."

"I'm going to save him. I'm going to rescue him. That's what I came here to talk to you about."

I shook my head. The restaurant behind Rosier was dark and empty, barely open. We must have been the first customers the place had all day. When Rosier stretched his fingers in front of him, I saw little black marks in the webbings. "I don't believe you," I said.

"What don't you believe?" Rosier's smile widened, but his eyes narrowed. It may have been against the sun coming through the clouds in the window behind me.

"You. Everything about you. I don't know what you're doing or why you're doing it. And stop smiling, like you know something no one else does."

"I feel like smiling." He clasped his hands together and pressed down on his knuckles with his fingertips.

"And that's another thing. You never answer a question straight."

He took a deep breath and closed his eyes. He opened them again. Their nauseated green color glinted in the sun. "I don't know what I can say to you to convince you to help me break Regulus out of prison."

I laughed and flecks of beer flew out of my mouth and landed on Rosier's plate. "There's nothing you can say, Rosier, you're right. There's nothing you can do to convince me, because I'm sure you're a Death Eater, and even if you weren't, I know you well enough to know you must have some ulterior motive, which might involve having me or Regulus or both of us killed."

Rosier laughed again. "Those are serious doubts. But if I wanted to kill Regulus. Well, he's as good as dead where he is. He'd probably be happy to be killed. You know he's starving himself. Everyone does at first. And you, well. I'll let you decide if your personal risk is too great."

I swallowed the end of my beer. "Thanks for lunch, Rosier."

"You're welcome." As I was walking away, Rosier caught the waitress by the wrist and ordered a bottle of wine.

* * *

_A/n: So, here is the first chapter of the sequel to "The Life You Lose". It is extra-long on account of I felt bad about making y'all wait so long for the last chapter of TLYL and then changing the end and everything so that it was kind of anticlimactic and you didn't get much new material at that. Sorry. Gosh, this is angstier than I'm used to being. I've got to admit it's been real fun so far, though. I will warn you that, like TLYL, this is a wip as of now, so I can't make promises about how often or regularly I'll update, or when it will be done. I do have a few chapters already written though, so there's more coming. Fair warning. As always readers and reviewers will be showered with praises._


	2. Chapter 2

I was in and out the rest of the day, and when I got home that evening, James asked me how it went. I had to think for a minute, to realize he was talking about my parents.

"Well, it didn't."

He was cutting vegetables on the kitchen counter, drawing the knife slowly back and forth over and through them. His fingers almost touched the base of the blade.

"Oh?" His voice nearly cracked in the attempt to sound surprised.

"Shut up." I punched him in the arm and his hand slipped, almost under the knife.

"What, are you trying to maim me?" He brandished the blade at me and I hooted. "So, you didn't go?"

"No, I didn't go."

He nodded and went back to carefully slicing a carrot.

"I'm still doing it though. Just not today."

"Your funeral. What did you do today, then?"

"I went grocery shopping. Bought these carrots. Mum." I reached for one, but changed my mind halfway there and leaned on the counter instead.

"Must have been a long line."

"I went through every carrot in the bin. Only the best for my Jamesie." I smiled. I wasn't careful enough and felt the scabs around the corner of my lip crack. It was time to reapply the ointment, but Lily was out at the library.

* * *

The next day I went to the Healer's office. Lily told me I could go alone, if I really wanted, but the way she said it, I let her come with me. She stayed in the waiting room when I went in to see the Healer.

The Healer unwound the bandages quicker than Lily did and left excess ointment piled up on the raw wounds. I felt it slide around when I moved my face.

"You should start letting it breathe," she said. "Begin by taking the bandages off in the evening, a few hours before bed. If you can stay still in your sleep and sleep on your back, you could even leave them off overnight." At the end of her sleeve, a colorful wooden bracelet dipped in and out of sight with the movement of her arm.

"The wounds are healing slowly." She squinted into my face. Her wire frames almost touched my skin. "Slower than I hoped they might." She took her glasses off and wiped them on her smock. "But they are healing. Now, do you have any questions or concerns?"

"I did want to ask something. Do you know, well, what my face is going to look like? When it's done. Healing, I mean."

She didn't hesitate. I was thankful, not to have to see her eyes soften or pity form. I reckon she'd seen things a lot more pitiful than me. "Well, there is going to be a lot of scar tissue. Around where you lost the eye in particular. Of course, we can do reconstructive spells. You'll get a prosthetic eye. Your nose is going to need a lot of work, for practical purposes, to open the airways so you can breathe more easily. We'll reconstruct the bridge. It's hard to predict how these things will turn out before they're done, but you're fortunate this happened now, and not twenty years ago. There's a lot we can do now." She turned around to the counter and frowned down at some papers. "Now, how is the pain?"

I scratched behind my ear. "I think I need to renew that prescription."

* * *

After the appointment, Lily and I went straight to the chemist. I took a dose of the potion in the w.c. when we got home and the lay the rest of the afternoon on the sofa while Lily talked on the phone in the next room, thumbed through magazines in the bay window, cooked lunch, held a one-sided conversation with me, and eventually said she was going to go take a nap.

She came back downstairs after about 30 minutes. She thought I was asleep and put the back of her hand on my forehead, then her palm on my cheek. She sighed big, theatrically, murmured something. I could even hear her rubbing her belly, the fabric scritching under her fingers. She got down on the floor by the sofa and put her face next to mine on the cushion.

"What happening to you?" she asked.

"I don't feel well."

"You don't have a fever."

"That's not the only way to not feel well, Lily." I didn't open my eye, but I did smile a little. I didn't want her to worry.

"Do you want some tea? I was about to make some."

"Yes, thank you." I opened my eye, meaning my answer to be a sign of gratitude. Meaning it to appease her.

Her eyes in front of mine were dimmer than usual in the unlit living room, but she smiled when I looked at her.

When she got up, I tried to hold my eye open for as long as I could, but after a minute I couldn't look across at the bay window and the dust floating in the hazy unlight and closed it again.

James got home after an hour. I sat up and stretched and yawned. "Hey, Prongs."

He flipped the light switch. "How long have you been sleeping?"

"I don't know. What time is it?"

"Wish I could nap all day."

"You could. You choose to have a job."

"It seems silly when you put it that way." James laughed and fell slack onto the couch beside me. After a pause, he looked at me. "How was the Healer?"

I didn't think hard enough before turning into Padfoot. The transition was hard these days. Scraps of Padfoot's face hung in tangled knots of meat and fur. It hurt, and the dog-I-didn't know any better than to swipe at the wounds with my paws.

James grabbed me where my front legs connected to my chest and pulled me up against his torso. He held my paws down so I couldn't irritate the wounds.

"If you keep this up, I'm going to have to get you one of those cone collars." He rubbed me behind the ears and smoothed the fur on top of my head and on my neck. I laid my heavy head against his chest. "I reckon this means things didn't go well. Padfoot always means something really good or something really bad." I licked at his fingers as they drifted near my face.

"Sometimes I wish I got a more cuddly animal to turn into. No one can be cross with a big shaggy dog. Stags are not so sympathetic. Not to mention the antlers tend to get stuck in doorways." He began collecting the fur I shed into a pile on the arm of the sofa. I closed my eye and relaxed all my weight into him. "This is such a convenient excuse for you not to have to talk. I hate it when you make it look like I'm talking to myself. I don't even know if you're listening-are you awake?" I felt air bending in front of my face, and my tongue shot out to lick his palm. He laughed, the laugh became a yawn, and he let his opposite palm rest on the crown of my head.

When I woke up, I was myself again, and James was still asleep with his hand on my head. I could hear the radio on in the other room and Lily's silverware rhythmically clinking against her dish.

I thought about going to talk to her. She was a good friend. It was almost too much goodness in one place. I went upstairs, tiptoeing to make sure she wouldn't hear.

They'd been thinking about getting decorative trim for the baby's room. Yellow duckies or something.

Lily was due in July. I still had my flat. There wasn't any sense in paying rent and it standing empty. Same way there wasn't any sense in James falling asleep with me while Lily kept company with the radio.

I lay down on the unmoored mattress and covered my face with a pillow. The pillow under my head slid off onto the floor. I tried to retrieve it, hooking my arm backward off the mattress, but my fingers couldn't find it. I took the pillow off my face and put it under my head.

I didn't fall asleep for a while. I thought about turning back into Padfoot.

* * *

The next morning, when James came up to the baby's room to give me a cup of coffee, he announced he'd got in touch with Remus and we were all going to meet up tonight.

"No dinner parties," I told him. I had the pillow over my face again.

"No, no dinner parties." He pushed down on the pillow, over my face, until I shoved him off.

"That hurts, dammit."

He spilled a bit of coffee on the floor and cursed. "Sorry, mate. But anyway, we're going to meet at a pub, all right? Is that all right with you?"

"What pub? I don't want to talk to Ed."

"Ed is very nice, but no, not that pub. Remus wanted to meet us in Hogsmeade."

"You know." I sat up and gathered all the covers up around my chest. "You didn't used to think 'nice' was such a high compliment."

"There's nothing wrong with nice. I'm being unduly nice to you right now." He thrust the cup of coffee at me.

"Thank you. And no, there's nothing wrong with nice. But it shouldn't be all you can say about a person."

"There are worse things you can say."

"But a lot better, too. Shit, at least be creative."

"You know, I don't even know what the hell we're arguing about."

"I don't know." I stood up and grabbed my jeans off the floor. "I think I'm going to move back home."

"Not this again." More coffee splashed out of the cup and onto the floor.

"Stop that, you don't want to move your baby into a dirty room."

James didn't say anything for a second.

I looked back at him. His eyes were unfocused behind his glasses.

"Yeah, a baby has to live here," I said. "That baby that's gonna come out of Lily sooner or later."

He didn't respond.

I buttoned my jeans and sat down next to him on the edge of the mattress. "I know, it's nutters. It's your own fault, though."

"Fault? It's the best thing that ever happened to me in my life."

"Okay. Then this 'best thing ever' is going to have to live here. Which means I'm going to have to move out."

"Yeah, eventually. Maybe in July. And even then, really, this is a big room, and a little baby. You probably don't even have to move out until he's like… seventeen. Most of the teen years he'll spend away, thank god, can you imagine having to live with our teenage selves?"

I laughed. James glanced at me, and his grin grew wide. "I mean, not that you've changed so much. But you'll get along with a five-year-old pretty well, might feel outclassed by the time he's eleven. Our two sons."

"What if you have a daughter?"

"You like playing dolls, don't you?"

"Action figures."

He giggled.

"But seriously, James, I can't be your son. Well, besides the physical impossibility-so help me god, if you make a time-turner joke about fucking my mum I'm leaving right now."

James doubled over and slapped me on the knee. "Hoo-boy, beat me to it; that would've been a good one, but wow, disgusting."

I clapped him between the shoulder blades. While he was still laughing, I said, "So, I'm going to leave soon. My flat, it doesn't make any sense paying for it and it standing open."

He stopped laughing and sat up. My hand slid off his back. "So quit your lease and move in here."

"Stop."

"We have the room. Honestly."

"Yeah. Where? I'm not sharing a room with your baby; I really thought you were joking about that."

"Are we wizards or aren't we? We'll make an add-on."

"Do you think Lily wants me living with your family permanently?"

"Lily loves you and you know it."

"More to the point, I don't want me living here permanently. I'm a grown man and this is pathetic."

"It's not pathetic." James sniffed indignantly. "You have a medical condition that needs treatment."

"I can easily do that myself. I have a mirror and functioning hands. And it's getting better."

James didn't have a quick rejoinder. He looked at the ground and said, "I'm glad it's getting better." I looked down at my functioning hands and picked at a patch of dry skin on my finger. James took an audible breath. "You're my family, Sirius, as much as anyone, and I don't know why it would be weird for you to live here, with a family you're a part of. And on top of that, a family takes care of one another, and obviously you need that right now."

I almost wanted to laugh. "What does that mean?"

"I just mean, sometimes. It's just that, I don't know, lately. I worry about you, sometimes."

I did laugh, then. James looked at me out of the corner of his eyes. Something about how clueless he was made me want to hug him. I grabbed his shoulders. "You stupid git. Don't worry, I'm fine. Shit. What, you think something bad happens and I lose half my face and I'm just going to fall apart?"

James laughed nervously and patted me on the back. He was well out of his element here.

I disengaged and felt around the bandages on my face. "Besides, my Healer said they can reconstruct my nose. Soon. I'm looking forward to the horrible scarring. I love the screams of children."

"That's-" James's eyes froze, and I could see all the way around his irises. "There won't be 'horrible scarring,' will there?"

"Relax, Prongs, I was joking. But honestly, of course there's going to be scars. Healer said they could put a prosthetic eye in, though."

"Who did it?" His eyes had narrowed. He was staring at my face, at the place where my left eye used to be.

"Come on, you know I don't know. If I ever saw them, if I remembered anything about them, wouldn't I have said something?" I stood up and moved toward the wall. "Of course I wish I knew who did it."

"It's malicious. The way they did it. It's spiteful, it's personal. It's someone you know. We know."

"Well, obviously. I've had some guesses, but what can I do?" I put my finger on a spot on the smooth wall and began to pick at the paint with my fingernail.

I could almost hear James tenting his fingers and furrowing his brow behind me. I could predict the number of times his jaw flapped open and shut while he considered whether or not to say what he was going to say.

"Regulus must know."

"He does not." I peeled off a half-inch square of green paint and crumbled it into dust.

"How couldn't he? He found you, he brought you back."

"Leave him out of it, okay? If he knew, why wouldn't he have said something? It doesn't make any sense. Just leave him alone."

I heard him get up. He was standing behind me. "I'm not accusing him of anything, Sirius. I'm just saying, maybe it's worth it to talk to him."

"Holy shit, are you joking?" I balled my fists and didn't turn around. "I can't even see him. You want me to send him an owl, or what? If he knew, he might not be where he is. Why wouldn't he say something like that?"

* * *

We went down and ate breakfast with Lily. She pretended not to have heard us arguing, or maybe she'd been in the garden. I always felt silly arguing with James. We didn't do it very often, not for real, and afterwards I felt like showering, or sometimes playing Quidditch.

"What do you have today, Lils? Baby appointment? Some kind of prenatal play date?" James asked.

I pushed the eggs around on my plate. I wanted a steak dinner at a restaurant. I thought about trying to ask a girl, and I remembered my face. Funny how easy it was to forget.

"I was thinking more like stealing Sirius's motorbike and going on a bender of some kind. Maybe a booze cruise. I can't find my sunglasses, though."

"Booze cruise?"

"It's a Muggle thing. You think it's too late for an abortion?"

"Shit, Lily, don't joke like that."

Lily laughed, showing off a mouthful of half-chewed sausage.

"You're both off your nut today, you know?" James looked like he had a stomachache.

"Maybe that'll get you to stop joking about 'prenatal play dates', you twat. Like to see you carry this thing around all day. You two are going out with Remus tonight, aren't you?"

"Yeah."

I sucked down the rest of my coffee and concentrated on keeping my eye peeled open. I imagined peeling it like a squishy grape. I wondered if I would wear an eyepatch when I took the bandages off for good. Probably not, if they thought I could have a glass eye. But maybe an eyepatch would cover more of the scars. It might be funny.

I had forgotten to take the bandages off last night. I still hadn't done that. I still hadn't looked at my bare face in the mirror. When I showered, the mirror fogged up so I didn't have to.

"Do you think they can make me a glass eye that actually sees?" I asked.

I think James may have been in the middle of a sentence. His mouth was hanging open a bit and he looked wounded. Lily snorted.

"Sorry."

"Don't be, thinking about your future bionic body parts is much more entertaining than whatever shite James was talking." She tweaked the end of James's nose. His face fell into a smile.

I pushed my plate away from me and put my chin down on my folded arms. I felt Lily's palm on my back. She rubbed circles across my shoulders, and I think she had her hand on James's shoulder, too. She said, "My boys." Her voice quavered.

I sat up. She had tears in her eyes. James already had his arms around her when I asked what was wrong. James kind of shook his head at me over her shoulder.

"Nooo…" Her voice trilled at the end. She had her face buried in James's shirt, so her voice was muffled too. "Nothing's wrong." Her arms were so tight around his neck, James's face was turning red. "I just, it's just that I love you both so much. And I'm going to have a baby. And I already love him so much."

James laughed and choked a bit at the same time. Lucky for him, Lily unlocked herself from his neck and threw herself around mine. Her face against my chest was wet and hot from crying. I smoothed her hair down and closed my arms around her back. Loving Lily was easy.

"Okay, okay, I'm sorry." Lily pulled away and wiped her eyes with the heels of her hands. James picked at the corners of his eyes with his fingertips and muttered something unintelligible. "Pregnancy hormones or whatever," Lily said.

"Yeah, and James has sympathy hormones." I smiled and wanted to put my arm around his shoulders, but I still felt a little strange about earlier.

"We're going to be a family." Lily started crying again.

* * *

_A/n: BEFORE ANYONE ASKS, NO, at this time Mad-Eye Moody did NOT, in fact, have his celebrated "mad eye", which would render Sirius's question about his hypothetical bionic eye superfluous. Let me refer you to page 588 in the American edition of _Goblet of Fire_: "Mad-Eye Moody was sitting there—except that there was a very noticeable difference in his appearance. He did not have his magical eye, but two normal ones." Now, this scene takes place _after_ Halloween 1981, if we are to extrapolate from Karkaroff's statement that "the Ministry is trying to—to round up the last of the Dark Lord's supporters" (p. 587). And obvi this story is taking place prior to that time. And in closing, let me also refer you to page 589 of the same edition: "'Why, yes…there was Rosier,' said Karkaroff hurriedly. 'Evan Rosier.' 'Rosier is dead,' said Crouch. 'He was caught shortly after you were too. He preferred to fight rather than come quietly and was killed in the struggle.' 'Took a bit of me with him, though,' whispered Moody to Harry's right. Harry looked around at him once more, and saw him indicating the large chunk of his nose to Dumbledore. 'No—no more than Rosier deserved!' said Karkaroff, a real note of panic in his voice now." And that is why Evan Rosier is my favorite minor Death Eater, because he is the psycho who took a chunk out of Moody's nose. It is my personal canon that he bit it off tbqh. RIP._

_PS: Sorry for these author's notes, I couldn't help myself._


	3. Chapter 3

By that evening, things were less strained between James and me. That afternoon, we read books together in the living room. Well, he read, and I tried to read and fell asleep instead.

"Tonight," I said, when I woke up, "remind me to take my bandages off before bed. My Healer wants me to sleep without bandages."

"Hmm." James flipped the page of his book. "No," he said, "not tonight. Tonight, we are going to get well under the table, and it seems dangerous. I don't want to poke out your other eye trying to take off your dressings." He looked up from his book and grinned at me.

* * *

We met in Hogsmeade, which was out of the way for all of us. But the village was coated in a thin layer of snow, with twinkling lights strung across the High Street. At the Three Broomsticks, there were a couple of kids who were clearly seventh years, trying to act casual. Part of me wanted to heckle them and threaten to tell their parents and their Head of House. Those kids reminded me a bit of James and me, before I realized Rosmerta enjoyed having us around and wouldn't tattle. Back when I was good-looking.

Remus was already at the bar when we came in. James clapped him on the shoulder and he turned around to face us.

He looked tired and there was a little streak of gray in his wavy hair. When he smiled, it didn't reach his eyes.

"Hey," he said, and reached out for my hand. "How are you doing? I mean, both of you." He took his hand away and combed through his hair with his fingers.

"Good," I said, but I felt unsettled. I tried, unsuccessfully, to let James sit in the middle with me on the other side, but James picked that moment to excuse himself to the toilet.

So, I sat down on the stool next to Remus and asked, "How are you?"

"Oh, fine." He stared down at his beer and pushed his finger up and down on the side. James had told me that Remus came to visit me in the hospital, but I was still unconscious.

Rosmerta came down to me at the bar. I could tell she hadn't recognized me yet. I knew she would, but I didn't want to say anything. Remus seemed to intuit my discomfort and ordered beers and whiskeys for James and me while I leaned low over the bar and pretended to fish for something in my pockets. I only looked up when she had brought the drinks and left.

"Thanks," I said.

Remus smiled. It flashed on his face briefly and left again. "You know, I wanted to see you before now."

"No, you didn't. Why would you want to see this?" I pointed at my face.

"Just as soon as you get an eyepatch, the girls will love you more than ever." He took a drink of his beer and I of my whiskey. "But I did mean to see you. It's been a rough few months."

"That's putting it mildly." From what I understood, Remus had spent a lot of time in Eastern Europe trying to establish contact with werewolves and werewolf communities. Most recently, he'd been in Albania, I thought. "Don't worry about not seeing me. You're doing something more important."

"Sometimes I feel like I'm not doing anything at all. Just sitting in forests, waiting for the full moon so I can prove to these people I'm not lying."

"More than what I'm doing, which consists largely of taking drugs and drinking." I grinned.

"Well." Remus swallowed a gulp of his beer with difficulty. He grimaced. The whites of his eyes were reddish. "I'll drink to that."

I laughed and clapped him between the shoulder blades. He looked at me out of the corners of his eyes and his lips softened.

"What have you got for the pain?" he asked.

"The Healer gave me the strongest painkillers she can prescribe. I sleep through most of the day now." I grinned through my teeth.

Remus laughed. "Madam Pomfrey prescribed me those when we were in Hogwarts. When I missed a whole week of classes because of them, well."

James came back to the bar and sat down with a hopeful look on his face. "What's funny?" he asked. He picked up his whiskey and drank about half of it.

We laughed again. "It's nothing," Remus said, shaking his head.

James, who had begun to laugh, too, frowned and turned to his beer.

Remus put his chin in his hand and looked at me. His eyelashes were long, thick, and darker than his hair. They made him look always thoughtful, but I could never tell what he was thinking about.

James's face peeked out from behind Remus's shoulder and he gave me a pouty look. I rolled my eyes and kicked at him under the bar, but just hit Remus by accident. "Sorry."

"Don't say sorry to me." He punched me in the arm.

All the tension in my back eased. If I hadn't been thinking about it, I might have slid off my barstool. I punched him back and asked, "Hey, I need the toilet, do you think you could order me another round?"

Remus nodded, and James seemed to be doing some kind of acrobatic balancing act to stay on his chair.

On my way to the toilet, I walked by the table where the conspicuous Hogwarts students were sitting. I could've sworn I heard one of them say my name. The other one looked up at me as I passed and nudged the first one with his elbow. Had I had a few more drinks in me, that would've been all I needed to grab one head in each hand and slam their skulls together until I saw brains. Now, it was only enough to make my flesh go hot and goose-pimpley.

When I came back to the bar, James was talking enthusiastically at Remus.

I didn't bother trying to figure out what he was saying. "Those Hogwarts kids are talking about me," I said.

Remus looked up at me. His eyes were sad and steady. "You'd better get used to that."

James grabbed my wrist and pulled my ear down close to his mouth. "Once we get a little drunker, we'll handle them." He wasn't even whispering, and his breath already stank. I pulled away, laughing partly because his breath tickled my ear, and partly because he was already drunk.

I caught Remus's gaze. He rolled his eyes and smirked. I grabbed James's face between my two hands and kissed him on the forehead. He squirmed out of my grip, laughing. Remus grabbed my opposite arm and pulled me down onto my barstool.

"You two are just as bad as teenagers," he said. He was still holding onto my wrist. He flagged down Rosmerta with his free hand, and I again hid my face while he ordered drinks.

"She knows who you are, you git," he said. "She's not saying anything to be polite. But it would be nice of you to say hi."

"God, what is this obsession with niceness nowadays?" I had twisted in my seat a bit to face the room. My eye inevitably fell on the Hogwarts students, who kept sending what I expect they meant to be surreptitious glances my way.

"She doesn't think you're a monster, if that's what you're worried about," Remus was whispering, and he'd leaned closer to me. I could feel his breath on my shoulder. Not like James, his breath didn't tickle me. It was warm and a bit sticky, like a sauna, or your grandmother's house. It made me sleepy. When I looked at his eyes, they were so unchanging. I couldn't see past them.

"Do you think I'm a monster?" I don't know where I got the gall to ask him.

He flattened his lips and turned his head off the to side. "No." He rotated his body back toward James. "Hey, have you told Rosmerta you're having a baby?" He tapped on the bar as Rosmerta was passing. "Hey, James, tell Rosmerta about how you found out Lily was pregnant."

James sat up straight and adjusted his glasses. "Well, you might think that would be obvious…" he began.

Remus turned back to me. He took a breath and I thought he was going to say something, but he just sighed and pressed his thumb and forefinger against his brow.

I leaned in close without thinking about it, trying to see his face. "I'm sorry?" I said. My hand hovered close to his arm.

"Oh, don't." He waved my hand away. "It's hard to talk to you, sometimes, you know. I'm trying to work up to it."

"Why is it hard to talk to me?" I put my hand back on my knee and tried to stop leaning into him. I just wanted to see his face when he spoke to me.

"You just have this way with me, now, sometimes. When you're too nice, and I know it's because you feel guilty." He took his hand away from his face and looked at me. "Like just now. When you ask me if I think you're a monster. And you give me this earnest, leaning into me thing. And I know you're looking for ways to self-flagellate. Well, you're not getting me to do your dirty work. If you feel guilty, don't make me dredge up shit I'd just like to forget about, just so you can feel as bad as you'd like to feel."

I tried not to smile, but I couldn't help it. I grabbed my beer and took a big drink to cover it up.

I wasn't fooling Remus, though. "If you still had a nose to punch, you can bet I'd be doing that right now."

"I'm sorry, you're right," I said, still smiling in spite of myself. "It just surprises me how right you are sometimes."

"Just because you never take the time to analyze your own motivations, or those of anyone else, I might add, doesn't mean that no one does."

I laughed through my beer this time and splattered a few drops on Remus's jumper.

He looked down at his chest and back up at me. "You utter twat."

I smiled and dabbed at his jumped with a cocktail napkin.

He snatched it out of my hand. "Please." I watched him smear the wet spot around for a minute, before he looked up at me again. "You know, you shouldn't feel so bad, though, about this. You did everything you could have for Regulus. More than I, or I think most people, would have."

I wanted to reach out and grab his hand, but I settled for grabbing my beer and running my finger around its lip. "I don't feel bad for what I did or didn't do," I said.

Remus had this way of looking and looking at me he was doing now, and I could tell even though I was looking down at my beer. He sat perfectly still beside me. I twisted my brow, and the skin above my former eye went taut and twinged.

I drank my beer and Remus waited, not moving at all.

Over my shoulder, I could hear those Hogwarts kids whispering. Why were they whispering? I jerked my chin back over my shoulder and looked at Remus.

His eyes slid over to them and his mouth puckered a bit.

"Do you know them?" I asked.

He shook his head and shrugged. "They're probably just scared they're going to get caught drinking off school grounds," he said, loud enough for them to hear.

The thrum of their whispers ceased. I laughed. Sometimes I wanted to kiss him.

"Listen, fucking ignore them. Do you want another whiskey?" Before I could answer, Remus touched Rosmerta on the arm, interrupting James in the middle of what I strongly believe was a detailed account of his fetus's conception.

We got our whiskeys and Remus poured his down his throat before it ever touched the bar. I could not let a challenge like that go unanswered, so I likewise finished mine. It took a lot to get me drunk these days, and I was not yet, but I think maybe the painkillers hadn't worn off. My eyelids felt heavy.

"You know, I never would have guessed about Regulus," Remus said.

"What do you mean?" I stiffened.

He shrugged. "Just that he must have changed a lot since I knew him. He was one of the worst, just for unadulterated pureblooded bigotry. It's a remarkable change." He kept his eyes on me, his expression cool.

"Yes, well. People can do that, you know." I wasn't trying to sound confrontational, but I couldn't help it.

"What do you think did it?" he said. "What do you think made him change his mind?"

"Er." I looked down at my beer. He had said something about that to me, but I hadn't focused on it too much. I didn't understand why anyone's mind would need changing on the matter, and I didn't want to understand.

Remus glanced over his shoulder at James. He had turned around on his stool, and was chatting happily with Rosmerta and the witch and wizard sitting beside him. "James didn't want you to help Regulus, did he?"

"No, of course not."

Remus nodded and pushed his hair out of his face. "There are people who are going to wonder why you did it."

"Those people can go right to hell, then." I tried to sound calm.

Remus didn't respond, but kept looking at me.

Unable to keep quiet, I said, "I turned out to be right, didn't I?"

He frowned and looked up at the ceiling, as though he were considering the question.

"He saved my life," I said. My muscles were tense.

"Your life wouldn't have needed saving if it weren't for him."

I snorted. "That's what James says."

"He shouldn't have involved you. That was selfish. And he won't even confess who was responsible, who actually did it."

"You have been talking to James, haven't you?" I was standing up now; I didn't really know when that had happened.

James heard; I saw his head swivel. Then _I_ heard something, and _my_ head turned.

"—Brother is a Death Eater, and my dad says that he's probably one, too…" The one kid who was talking was facing away from me, but his friend was looking at me, and when my eye caught his, they widened, and he turned and hit his friend on the arm.

Remus was out of his seat before I had time to react. "I thought I told you to mind your own fucking business," he shouted.

I pulled my wand out, and I heard James behind me getting up, too.

I stepped forward, and Remus stuck his arm out in front of me and cut me across the chest.

The kids jumped out of their chairs.

I pushed through Remus's arm, but he swung around and grabbed me by the shoulders. I started to push him off, but he gave me a shake and said, "Sirius, it's not worth it." He looked me in the eye.

I tore my gaze away and tried to find those kids. They were long gone.

Remus kept holding onto my arms, and James came up by my shoulder. I could see out of the corner of my eye the set of his jaw, and I knew he was thinking of going after them.

"I'm okay." I gave Remus a gentle clap on the side of his neck and turned back to the bar. "Sorry, Rosmerta."

She smiled. "Not a problem, Sirius."

"Let's have another round," I said, and put my arm James to steer him back to the barstools. I ended up sitting in the middle of them now. "Maybe a round-and-a-half."

Remus slapped me on the back and gave me a smile that lasted slightly longer than his usually did.

James leaned into my side and put his hand on my shoulder. "Another second and we'd've got them."

"They're not worth it," Remus repeated. His whiskey was already gone.

"They're not worth the ground you walk on," James said helpfully.

Despite my best efforts, my blood was still thrumming in my ears, my muscles were still twitching and jerking. I finished my round quick, and that made me feel a little better.

* * *

In another minute, James, Remus, and I decided to take a walk.

"What, do you want to go up to the Shrieking Shack?" James elbowed Remus in the ribs and wiggled his eyebrows.

"Ha. Ha." Remus's expression didn't alter in the slightest.

That made me smile, and I threw my arm around Remus's shoulder. "If you want to see something real scary, I'll turn into Padfoot." I pointed at my face. "Zombie dog."

"Yeah, I know the feeling."

"Don't change, Sirius." James sounded legitimately concerned. Under Hogsmeade's twinkling little lights, I could see his eyes swimming. I laughed and reached across Remus with my free arm to push James in the chest.

He stumbled backwards, and I stumbled forwards. Remus grunted and caught me under the arm. I hadn't realized I'd thrown all my weight around his neck until he pulled me back up to a standing position and straightened his back.

"Sorry," I said.

The corner of his mouth quirked, and he squinted into my face.

I cleared my throat and turned away, looking back at James, who had fallen and was laughing on his backside in the snow.

"Hey!" I took my arm off Remus's shoulders and ran back to James. He stuck out his hand for me to help him up. I jumped on him from a few feet away and buried his face in the snow.

"Hey, stop!" He sputtered, but at the same time he was trying to snake his arm around my chest, in a vain attempt to gain leverage. I could've held him down as long as I wanted, but that wasn't fun, so I eased up on him a little. He got his arm out from under him and lashed out with it. He popped me right in the nose.

My vision blanked. I let go. I fell back off James and into the snow behind him. Rather than pain, I felt my face around my nose growing cold. My fingers were coated in melting snow. I touched my face. Before I could look at them, James yelled, "Holy shit!"

I looked at him. He had just managed to sit up. The next second his face was under mine, peering up at me. Remus's hands came down on my shoulders, and the snow crunched under him as he knelt down beside me.

"Are you okay? I'm so sorry." James looked like he was about to cry, or maybe he already was. His face was wet with snow.

"I'm okay." I felt a little light-headed, but I think it was from the drink and painkillers. I shook my head. "It wasn't your fault."

"I shouldn't have-"

"James, it really wasn't your fault," Remus said. His warm voice was right by my ear.

"But you're bleeding." James squinted at me. "A lot."

Remus and I laughed, and after a bit, James chuckled too.

"It'll be fine," I said.

"Yeah. But you ought to go home and clean yourself up," Remus said. "Come on." He hooked his arms under mine and pulled me to my feet.

"I don't think I need to go home," I said. I wiped my fingers off on my jeans.

James struggled to his feet, still looking rather forlorn. "I reckon we should. I don't want to keep Lily up, anyway."

"Oh, for fuck's sake, Lily doesn't care," I said.

Remus clapped me on the back. "Well, in any case I've got to be getting home. I'm exhausted." His eyes were dispassionate as ever, looking something like great black holes when the twinkle lights swung over his head. His wavy hair was catching glinting snowflakes in its twists.

"Oh, come on. I haven't seen you in months."

"Well, what do you want to do? Go back in there with your face covered in blood?"

"Not as though this looks any more gruesome than before." My laugh came out as a bark that bounced off the nearby buildings.

Remus took a breath. At first I thought he was gearing up to argue with me, but he just pushed his hands in his pockets and said, "I'll see you soon."


	4. Chapter 4

For a couple of days, nothing noteworthy happened. Lily was really upset the next morning, especially since James and I didn't really know what to do with it that night, and she had to deal with a face full of caked dry blood before breakfast. We decided not to go to the Healer about it. I didn't want to have to explain what had happened, and besides, it didn't even hurt more than usual.

That was probably thanks to the painkillers. They were amazing. If I had known Remus had this stuff in school, I don't think I would've ever made it to lessons. I could see how he had such a hard time getting back to school after full moons. I was supposed to have a schedule for taking them, but I mostly took them whenever I wanted, typically when I woke up in the morning, and then with a beer at lunch.

That put me out all afternoon, usually. Sometimes, I took them again at night to help me sleep.

I could tell my perpetual listlessness was annoying Lily, but she wasn't going to say anything yet. It really wasn't fair; I slept all day with Lily around, and then woke up when James got home, and he didn't know the difference.

The next time I saw the Healer, she noticed that something had happened to my nose. At first I said I didn't know what she was talking about, but then she said it was a very serious problem if the painkillers were affecting my memory or causing blackouts. Then I confessed (except I didn't mention I'd been drinking), and she groaned out loud. Before I left, she forbade me from roughhousing. It was almost like talking to McGonagall.

When I got back home, Lily wasn't in, so I tried to do the bandages myself again. My fingers were not as adept as Lily's. I kept jerking the bandages the wrong way and abrading the tender skin. The Healer had said other than around my nose, the scabs were starting to form better and stronger and in some places even peel off naturally and leave fresh new skin there.

Eventually, I was able to get the bandages off and daub on thick layers of ointment. I was scared to put my fingers into the deeper wounds. I hadn't even washed my hands before I started. The Healer had told me I could use lighter bandages now, but I didn't really know how to wrap the bandages at all. They kept slipping off the back of my head. I realized after I'd finally managed to wrap a few thin layers sparsely over my face that I didn't know where the metal strips that held the dressings together were. I tried a sticking charm that seeped through the gauze and stung the wounds. After that, I just stopped trying and waited in the living room for Lily to get home.

She laughed up a storm when she saw what I'd done.

"I need to learn how to do this myself," I said through a clenched jaw.

"Well, hopefully, nobody will need to do it much longer." She was already undoing the mess I'd started with one hand and accio-ing the first-aid kit with the other. "What did the Healer say?"

"To come back in two weeks."

"Okay. That's good, right? An upgrade from once a week."

"Better, I reckon. Less annoying."

She pressed that little metal strip on and pinched my nipple. "Good as new."

"Christ woman, I'm going to tell James about this." I crossed my hands over my chest.

She wasn't listening. She was already in the kitchen, rustling around in the cupboards. "Do you know the worst thing about being pregnant?" She called. When she reemerged, she had a box of cereal in her hands.

"I imagine it's pretty stiff competition."

"And I can't even have a stiff drink!" She stopped what she was doing to shoot me a broad grin. "Do you get it?"

"And to think sometimes I wonder why you married James."

She shoved her hand into the cereal box. "But in all seriousness, I hate not being able to drink. You know, they tell me I can't even drink while I'm nursing because the alcohol will get in the milk."

"I think you were supposed to drink Guinness, because the yeast was good for the baby, or something." I stuck my hand out, and Lily passed me the box of cereal.

"Gross, don't get your bloody fingers in there. And I'm not even going to bother with saying how weird it is you know that. I can't keep the stuff straight, anyway. What you are and aren't supposed to do with your baby. Do you want to go to the kitchen? I'm going to make some tea."

We moved to the kitchen, where she made herself some tea, and I took a beer out of the refrigerator. It was coming up on March, and soon, we'd be able to sit outside, Lily said. It was still uncommon cold, though. The snow falling in Hogsmeade hadn't made its way down to Godric's Hollow, but you still couldn't go outside without your coat and scarf.

Lily squeezed the lemon she always took with her tea into her cup and blew across the top. Her lips looked chapped when she pursed them together.

"It's like you've become a mum overnight," I said.

She sat on a stool by the counter and crossed her ankles primly. "I know." She sighed. "It's a hard mold to fit. I'm only twenty years old, you know. It's not like I wanted to be a mother so soon."

"Well-"

"Not that I'm saying I don't want to be a mother. Of course I do. I'm so thrilled. But. I'm only twenty years old. I never saw myself settling down with James Potter. I love him, I love him so much, I do. But I saw myself becoming a Healer, having a professional career. I saw the two of us traveling more. I've never even been out of Great Britain."

I didn't know what to say. I looked out the window and watched the dead limbs on the trees out front blow in the wind. "You can still do all that stuff," I said, eventually.

"It's just this war. Everything seems like the last thing I'll ever do. This baby seems like the only thing that matters. Like I have to protect this baby, and that's what my life's about, now."

I felt my face redden. "Lily, don't think like that." I gripped my hands in my lap and held them tight.

"Well, look what's happening all around us. Everyday, I look at what's already happened to you. I don't even want to let James out of the house in the morning. Everyday he's ten minutes late getting home something in me just knows he's gone forever. I'm glad, every time you take your potion and go to sleep all day, cos I know where you are, and I know you're safe." She put her hand over her mouth. Her eyes glimmered.

I couldn't think of what to say, so I just reached out and squeezed her hand.

"But, I have something to tell you," she said, licking her lips and straightening her back. "I, er. I talked to some of James's parents' friends in the Ministry. And they have connections in the Justice Department, whom they spoke with. Er. So, basically there's a statute in place so family can visit their loved ones dying in Azkaban. No, don't worry, it's not-look, the way that it's set up, it can work both ways, in the statute they make an emergency exception to other visiting rules, including the one about, er, well, your situation, in the case of illness, one of the definitions being, er. Debilitation injury, which, actually, you qualify under." she tapped under her eye and bit her lip. "Because of the eye thing. So, well, the gist of it is that there's some paperwork, but basically, you can see Regulus." She took a deep breath.

"I didn't mean to overstep my bounds," she said, after I didn't respond right away. "James said I ought to let you do it on your own time. Or, I don't know. But I thought-"

"Thank you, Lily." That was the first think I could of, to assure her I wasn't angry. "You didn't overstep your bounds. Whatever that means." I looked down at my hands. "Thank you, I really mean it. I just."

"I understand if you're scared to go."

I twitched when she said that. I wished I could think of something to say. "When did you find the time to do all this?" I looked back up at her.

"There's a lot of time in the day, if you don't spend it all sleeping." She tried for a smirk. I could tell she was nervous, and the smirk came off pathetic.

"Oh, come on." I reached over and put my arms around her. "It's great, Lily, really. I just don't know what to say."

"I was really trying to help. I know I get too pushy-"

"It's not pushy, it's fantastic." I pulled away. "But I reckon you're right. I'm a bit nervous. That's all."

"Well, if you want me to go with you?"

I put my hand on her knee. "No way in hell."

She smiled.

* * *

That afternoon, I sat down with all the forms Lily had got together. They wanted a lot of weird things, numbers I wasn't even aware I had, things like that, but with some help from Lily, I got everything.

I argued with her about some things: "Do I really want it on Ministry records I'm missing an eye?"

"You must be joking. There's a mugshot of you with one eye. And besides that, are you mad? How could that possibly matter?"

But eventually, we rolled up everything and owled it to the Ministry.

That evening, I watched James try to set up a swing-set in the garden. Once the crossbeam fell on his hand, and while I was wildly laughing, he hit me with such a jelly legs jinx he had to carry me inside when I couldn't get up after fifteen minutes.

The next morning, an owl pecked at the kitchen window while we were eating breakfast. I opened the window, slipped a knut in the owl's leg pouch and brought the papers back to the breakfast table.

"Well, what does it say?" James asked. He still had a mouth half-full of porridge.

"It says I'm approved. I suppose. Whatever that means."

"When are you going?" Lily rose halfway out of her chair to peek over the edge of the parchment.

"Er. Where does it say that?" I rubbed at the corner of my eye. Lily slapped my arm away.

"Look at the end. Past all the rules and stuff," she said.

I flipped pages until I got to the last one and scanned it down to the bottom. "So. I think I'm supposed to go on… March 10. What day is today?"

* * *

That day was February 27, and the year was 1980, so it was a leap year. So I had twelve days, just a little less than two weeks.

Two weeks in my life was a time warp. I went into a day, and when I came out again it could be five minutes later or five weeks later. When I stopped to think about it, I hadn't lived with James and Lily for five weeks. That was hard to believe. In fact, on the 27th, I had lived with them exactly two weeks, or two weeks and half-a-day, if you count the evening after I got out of jail, which I don't. We didn't spend any time at the house that evening, anyway. I showered there, then we went out to dinner and James and I got pissed and I fell asleep at the table.

The day I woke up at St. Mungo's was December 12. I was arrested at the hospital and brought to the Ministry jail on the 13th. They decided to keep me there, instead of sending me to Azkaban. Something like protective custody. I don't know what they thought was going to happen to me that wasn't going to happen to Regulus, only worse, but I reckon that was the benefit of not being an ex-Death Eater.

The Ministry jail was boring and empty but largely inoffensive. It was not much more than a very slapdash row of holding cells in a kind of hallway space, and when someone opened the door at the end of the hall, I could hear people chattering on the other side. I think it was near some kind of offices. The main problem I had with the Ministry jail was that it was cold all the time, and everything jail-issue was uniformly threadbare. Going to sleep, I was always tempted to turn into Padfoot, but I figured I shouldn't put getting charged as an unregistered Animagus at the top of my to-do list.

At first, it was a lot worse. My face still caused me a lot of pain, then, and when the Healer came to change my dressings, every time the gauze moved across my face I tried to bit my lip and squeeze my eyes shut to keep from crying, but I couldn't even do that. I had trouble breathing, too, and at night I couldn't get to sleep for hours sometimes because of it. Now, it was a lot easier, and I had trained the muscles around my right eye to act independently of those around my missing left, so I could squeeze my eye closed if I wanted.

Visiting was weird in the Ministry jail, since usually people only stayed there one or two nights, but James and Lily came by for a few minutes a couple of times. It embarrassed me, more than anything. I wasn't embarrassed about being in jail-if anything, it bolstered my confidence that I had done the right thing; I kind of felt like a political prisoner-until I had to talk to Lily through a set of bars.

I spent Christmas and New Year's in jail and got out two days before Valentine's Day. By the time I got out, I was so used to the jail routine, it was weird to move around on my own schedule, and I had only been in two months.

On February 28, which was a Thursday, I helped Lily research an essay for her Healer training courses, meaning I went with her to the library and pointed out articles with funny illustrations in them. On Friday, I went back to my flat and put the books I'd brought to the Potters' back, sat down to read on the sofa, and tried to fall asleep but couldn't get comfortable. When I went back to James and Lily's that evening, I brought my favorite blanket from the flat with me.

Saturday, the first day of March, the three of us went to a Quidditch match with Mary Macdonald. We were supporting the Falmouth Falcons, a wholesome and extremely violent West Country team, against the Tutshill Tornadoes, notorious liars and cheats. We wore silly hats, plastic glasses shaped like falcons, and face paint. We bought big and over-priced paper cups of lager and loudly challenged the masculinity of the opposing team and their fans. We lost, and on the way out we almost got into a fight with a couple of burly Tutshill fans when they heard James speculating about the variety of sexual favors fans and team members had been and would be performing of the officiating crew. They would have messed us up bad, too, except they saw Lily was pregnant. When they turned away, Mary screamed some very insulting words at them, and the four of us had to really leg it out of there.

On Sunday, James got the idea it would be nice for us to make Sunday dinner for Lily. I wasn't so sure about the whole proposition, but I made a good show of chopping vegetables and taking liberal helpings of the alleged cooking wine.

When dinner was finally served, after a fire scare or two and some mild to moderate bloodshed, Lily said the beef Wellington was "brilliant". Toward the end of the meal, when James was about to unveil his _pièce de résistance_, a lemon tart for dessert (which was honestly more runny lemon juice than anything else-he'd realized early on his plans to mold it into the shape of Lily's head were misguided and unfeasible), we got a Floo from Peter. We were worried something was wrong, but Pete said he just wanted to pop by that evening. So James and I went down the shop to pick up some beer. When we got back, Lily had fallen asleep on the sofa. James picked her up and carried her to bed (she was a heavy sleeper), and she didn't wake up again until Pete was already there.

Peter was doing accounting work for Gringotts, and he'd been watching the finances of a few, shall we say, persons of interest, for the Order.

It wasn't glamorously dangerous, he said, but it worked on his nerves. If he got caught at it, the least he would get was fired.

"I don't know, I'm not finding anything out," he said, working his fingers through his knotty blond hair. "If the Rookwoods are siphoning money off for You-Know-Who, they're not putting it through the bank, first."

"Probably hiding it in all those moldy stags' heads he keeps around." James pulled a face. He had always been personally offended by Rookwood's penchant for hunting.

"Well, I don't know what I'm gonna say at the next Order meeting. It's more than my life's worth for Moody to think I'm slacking." Pete got up to get another beer.

"Relax, Wormtail," I called after him. "It's not like he can assign you detention or something."

We heard bottles clinking in the kitchen. "There are fates worse than detention," he said when he came back into the living room, face pink.

James and I cracked up, but Peter stayed silent and fidgeted with the label on his beer.

"Peter, seriously." James put his hand on Peter's shoulder. "It's not your fault that maybe Rookwood's too smart to put dirty money through Gringotts. You're doing everything you can."

"Yeah." Peter just stared down at his hands. "Er, so, anyway, how did the Falcons game go?"

"Just about as bad as you'd think, listen to this." James leaned forward and put his hand out in front of him, ready to do some in depth gesticulating.

I leaned back in my chair just in time to see Lily reach the bottom of the stairs. She was wearing of James's shirts and her hair was rumpled.

"Hi, boys." She waved. "Do we have any olives?"

"Er, maybe." James looked at me, and I shrugged.

"I'll check."

When she came back, she had a jar of olives in her hand, and what looked like a handful stuffed in her cheek. She ruffled Peter's hair. "Hi, Pete. Would you like any olives?"

"No thanks, Lily." He grinned up at her. "How are you?"

"Hungry," she said. She sat down on James's lap and stuck her feet between the couch cushions.

"Pete can relate," I said. I punched him in the arm.

He rolled at eyes at me.

Lily fished an olive out of the jar with her fingers, and stuck them all in her mouth together. "This baby'll be the death of me, I swear. By the time it's done cooking I'll weigh 500 stone."

"I'll love you anyway, baby."

"You look just as beautiful as ever," Peter said.

"Aw, thank you, Peter," Lily said. She smacked James on the chest. "Why don't you ever say stuff like that?"

"Maybe because you're always hitting me."

"Don't be such a baby. If I were really gonna hit you, you'd know it," she said.

They kissed, and Peter and I pulled faces at each other.

Peter stuck around for another couple hours, politely listening to Lily fill him in on the intricacies of her pregnancy while James and I argued about Quidditch. When it was time to go, we stood out in the front garden for a bit, talking about the next all-Order meeting, which was in a couple of weeks.

When James went back inside to use the toilet, Peter and I stood out squinting at the cloudy sky. He cleared his throat, and I stuck my hands into my pockets.

"So, er, I'm sorry about, well, everything," he said.

"You don't have anything to be sorry about." I forced a yawn.

"No. But all the same." He kicked at the grass. "Just seems unfair and all."

I didn't say anything to that, and after a few minutes of silence, we said goodbye and he Disapparated before James came back.

* * *

_A/n: I, too, am surprised by the prominent role Lily is beginning to play in this story. Idk maybe James would get more screen-time if he would sit still for a minute.  
_


	5. Chapter 5

The next day, I got my motorbike from the garage where I kept it. I took it out for a while, on the road and in the air. I tried to think of something I could work on it, but I kept it so well maintained that even after two months sitting in a garage it ran perfect. When I brought it back to the house, Lily said I better keep it out back. Was I crazy? I was going to get in even more trouble. I asked her if she wanted to go for a ride, and she looked like she wanted to hit me across the face.

"Get that death trap out of my sight, and take off those muddy boots before you come in," she said. "And honestly, you're going to kill yourself and everyone else driving that thing around with one eye. Probably run into a big bird or something and then what?" I cracked up, and she slammed the front door in my face.

Tuesday, Lily was gone when I woke up, maybe at the library or the hospital, and she and James didn't come home until late. I think they probably went on a date or something, but I didn't know why they didn't tell me. Even though I took a dose of painkillers plus some extra before bed, it took me a long time to fall asleep.

On Saturday, Lily brought home some baking ingredients. "I just thought maybe you'd want to bring your brother something."

"You think brownies are the way to go?" I weighed a bag of chocolate chips in my hand.

"Maybe something more nutritious, too," she muttered. "We can make some sandwiches Monday morning."

"It's nice of you to think of it. I never would have."

"Yeah, that's why I'm about to have a child and you're not."

"Well, I hope you won't ever have to bring him food in prison."

"I'll consider myself a success as a mother if I can just avoid that."

I went to get all the necessary bowls and pans out of the cabinets.

"Are you nervous?" Lily asked as I set a mixing bowl down on the counter. A couple of eggs flew out of their carton and into my hand.

"About what?" I cracked the eggs over the bowl and didn't look up at her.

"I mean, about going to Azkaban. Why are you putting the eggs in first?" She thrust a cup of flour at me.

"Does it matter?" I dumped the flour in the bowl and scooped up another cup.

"Which question is that in response to?" She pointed her wand at a cabinet and the bag of sugar shot out and landed in a puddle of flour near the mixing bowl. The flour splashed like dust from a crater, coating my shirt and sprinkling the lower half of my face.

"Er, both, I suppose." I brushed off my shirt with one hand, and with the other caused a stream of sugar to spout from the bag into the mixing bowl.

"Stop, you're putting in too much. Well, it doesn't matter, really. But I would be nervous."

"It's not too much. Do you have a recipe or something? I mean, it's not something I would choose to do. But I don't have a choice."

She cut off the stream of sugar with a dash of her wand. "I don't have a recipe; I just know," she said.

"What, women's intuition?" I grinned. When she turned around to pick up the butter, I sneaked a little more sugar in.

While I was laughing behind her back, she pointed her wand over her shoulder and flung a handful of flour in my face.

I laughed through my spit. "You know, when there are little pieces of flour going all doughy in my blood, you're the one who's going to have to pick them out."

"So you think. Maybe I'll just let them cook."

"That's gross." A drawer across the kitchen flew open and a whisk shot out and stuck with a plop in the mixing bowl.

"Well…" I could tell she was doing her very best to look nonchalant, twirling her wand in her fingers as the whisk spun faster and faster. "Last time we talked about it, you seemed pretty iffy. On the whole prospect. Of going. To Azkaban."

"Er. Yes. I don't really know what your point is." I scratched behind my ear.

"Oh, I probably don't have one." She flicked her wand and tipped the contents of the mixing bowl into a baking pan. "If I say I want you to talk to me more, you're just going to make fun of me."

I sent the baking pan into the oven and Lily set the timer. "When have I ever made fun of you?"

She looked like she was about to pop a vein in her temple at that comment, so I laughed and grabbed her shoulders. "If you want some kind of reassurance, yes, I am nervous, and yes, I will be fine. Thank you for helping me with the brownies." I patted the top of her head.

"More like you helped me!" she yelled after me as I walked out of the kitchen.

Sunday, James decided he wanted to go fishing. We spent two hours getting frogs in our boots by the edge of a pond that might have been better classified as a puddle brought into existence when someone spilled a goldfish bowl before I gave up and threw my fishing pole in the woods. James tried to call me a quitter as I stomped off, and I took off my boot and chucked it at his head. A frog fell out of the boot mid-flight and landed in the mud with a forlorn "ribbit".

Monday morning, I woke up at 4:00 a.m. I wasn't supposed to be at the Ministry until 9:30, but I didn't think I could get back to sleep. Not that I had slept much in the first place. Lily's very active concern had made me more nervous than before. I felt like I was going to a job interview, or like I had the night before I was to start Hogwarts, only with all the good, excited feelings drained out.

There was some anticipation, I'll admit. I'd never been to Azkaban, of course. The Ministry would only bring visitors by Portkey, and not a lot of people wanted to go. I didn't want to go. But that fear was fascinating, too. If James were coming with me, if I weren't going for the reason I was, we could've just about made a game of it.

James wouldn't be up for another four hours. I didn't know that I wanted to see him much this morning. James and Regulus, to me, still existed in separate worlds. It was hard to mention their names in the same sentence.

I went down to the kitchen and poured myself a scotch and water. I didn't want to be drunk when I got to Azkaban, but it couldn't hurt to have a couple in me. If I could've brought some whiskey to Regulus, I knew he would've liked it. I wondered if that was against the rules.

I watched the sky pinken through the kitchen windows, and after another couple of scotches, I fixed myself a pot of coffee. It seemed like I needed to have something prepared. My fingers kept itching for a quill, like I should write down some notes for a presentation I would be expected to give on my arrival. I tried to think of jokes I knew to tell him.

Finally, I just put my head down on the counter.

* * *

I woke up to James boxing my ears. I nearly fell out of my chair trying to hit him back. He jumped out of my range gleefully.

"What are you doing?" he asked. He went over to the sink and touched the pot of coffee I'd made with the back of his hand.

I yawned. "What time is it?"

"Er. 9:00. This coffee is cold."

"It should be. I made it at 6:00."

"And just left it here?"

"I fell asleep." I stood up and stretched.

"Your face is red," James said. He was pouring the cold coffee down the sink.

"Why don't you just heat it up?" I asked.

"It's not the same."

I went to the toilet and splashed some water on my face. Then I brushed my teeth. I had already dressed when I got up at 4:00.

When I came back downstairs, James was eating some toast and yogurt, with a steaming mug of coffee sitting by his elbow.

"I'm going to go. To the Ministry." I took my coat off the rack by the door.

James looked up. There was a lump of presumably half-chewed toast sticking out his cheek. The lump shifted and he swallowed. "Oh. Er. I had kind of forgot about that," he muttered.

"Well." I stood with my hand on the doorknob. "I'll be back this afternoon."

"Don't forget Lily's snacks," he said.

"Oh, thanks."

He beat me to the refrigerator and handed me the tray of brownies and bag of sandwiches we'd made last night.

"This feels kind of silly." I looked down at the brownies I was trying to balance on one hand while holding the paper bag in the other. "I feel like I'm going to a birthday party at a day care center."

"Yeah." James took the tray off my hand and set it on the worktop. "Is that better?"

"Yeah."

"I didn't just do that because I want to eat them."

We both laughed.

"Hey, do you know if I can brig him liquor?" I asked. "It seems cruel, to lock people up like that, with the Dementors and all, and not even let them drink."

James clapped me on the shoulder. "Maybe you can find out for next time."

* * *

The badge I got coming into the Ministry said, "Sirius Black, visiting Azkaban". I wasn't exactly sure where I was supposed to go. There was the Justice Department, where I'd been, which was different from the Department of Magical Law Enforcement and the Auror Headquarters, which was also different from the courtrooms and court offices. I was sure it must've said somewhere in that packet they sent me, but I'd left that at home. When I asked the wizard who inspected my wand, he just raised his eyebrows at my badge and popped his bubblegum. "Dunno, mate. Don't get that one very much."

"Oh, thanks so much for all your goddamn help," I muttered as I walked toward the lifts. I asked another couple of people on line for the lifts, and neither of them knew. Finally, a little old witch with a broad, squinting face and some black still mixed in with her steely curls overheard me. "I work in that department, young man." She smiled and patted my arm. I followed her into the lift.

"The Justice Department oversees prisons and prisoners," she said in sunny tones on our ride down. "So that's where you want to go." When we reached the right level, I tried to hold the lift for her, but she refused to exit before I had. "You're my guest," she said. "I don't let guests hold doors for me." She started down the hall at a waddle. I felt bad even thinking that about the only person who'd been anything like nice to me that morning, but there it was.

"Now, who do you know in Azkaban?" she asked. She had a throaty, smoker's voice. "Not the person who did your face, sweetheart?"

My face got hot and my remorse evaporated. "No. Not that person. I-I'm visiting my brother."

"Oh? I bet your brother's Regulus Black."

"How'd you know?"

"You look like him. The part of your face I can see, anyway."

I was beginning to come back around to liking her again. "How do you remember every prisoner and what he looks like?"

"I don't. Your brother was in the papers. People notice when a Black is told he's not above the law."

"I reckon you're right about that," I said.

We came to a door, in front of which she stopped. "Here we are." She held open the door for me. "Good luck, duck."

* * *

Things were simple from there. The witch behind the desk asked for my forms, and when I didn't have them, she rolled her eyes and asked for my name. That seemed to work out well enough, because a minute later she pointed at a row of stalls on the far wall.

"Number 3 leaves at 10:00. Which gives you," she looked down at her watch, "three minutes."

Three-and-a-half minutes later, I was spitting sea spray out of my mouth, and salt was stinging my eye.

"What the-" I held my arm up to shield my eye, and after a minute of strenuous blinking and eye-watering, I was able to focus on where I was.

I was on an outcropping of slippery rocks, waves pounding on either side. Ahead of me, the rocks led up to a kind of island with no visible vegetation. The walls-Azkaban's walls-rose straight up from the stone island as if it were a natural geological formation and disappeared into the misty gray sky without any suggestion of plateauing.

They couldn't have picked a much better spot for a prison.

I started up the rocks and got quite wet and cold on the way, but by the time I reached the island on which Azkaban was situated, I was out of the spray's reach.

When I got to the big iron doors, I had to knock. A slit at eye-level opened up, and a wizard with narrow eyes asked me to state my name and business.

"Sirius Black. Er, I'm visiting my brother, Regulus Black."

I heard some parchment shuffling on the other side of the doors. "Oh, okay, here you are," the wizard muttered. "Yeah, you're good, come in."

* * *

Inside, I had to give up my wand and submit to a much more thorough search than I would have desired. The guards took my bag of sandwiches and said they would get to him after they'd been tested for potions and spells. I asked if I could bring whiskey the next time I came, and judging by the enthusiastic responses I received, I doubted any items brought to the inmates ever ended up with them.

The place inside was already cold and drafty, but when they brought me closer to the cellblocks, I started to feel truly frigid, down to the marrow of my bones.

I was told they cleared the block of Dementors whenever there was a visitor, but I could feel them, or what I assumed was them, like the cold breath of something less than alive on my neck.

They brought me up to a middle level, and it grew abruptly warmer than it had been on lower levels. But even absent Dementors, my chest still felt as though there were a steel belt tightening around it.

I squared my shoulders and jutted my chin forward as I walked past a chain of empty cells.

Ahead of me, the guard stopped and examined his keys in front a cell door. He found the one he was looking for, and gestured at me to hurry up. I almost swallowed my tongue.

When I got to the cell, the guard held it open for me. The sound of the door shutting and locking behind me nearly made me cry.

Or maybe that was seeing Regulus.

He had been sitting on the camp-bed pushed against the wall of the six-by-nine room, but he stood up when I came in. He had his hands cuffed in front of him and his legs shackled. He was skinnier. In his face was where I noticed it the most. He normally had a fuller face than most of us-me, our mother and father, Bellatrix-but now his cheekbones stood out like scythes, with half a grimy beard filling in the hollows under them. His nose and the skin under his eyes were a bit green and swollen from the fractured bridge. It looked infected.

That was all I could think to say. "Your nose looks infected."

He rolled his eyes. The whites seem to stay exposed for too long. "At least I have a nose."

He laughed, and then I did, too.

"Hey," he said.

"Hey."

"Have a seat, please, I'm being a terrible host." He gestured at the bed with a sweep of his fists.

"Do you have to wear those all the time?" I asked.

"Just for visitors."

When I sat down, I could feel the metal frame cutting into the mattress.

He sat down beside him. His arms were trembling.

"I brought sandwiches," I said. I stared at his bony wrists.

He laughed again. His voice sounded hoarse, and his laughter rattled weirdly around the room. "I won't even see them. But, thank you."

"I'm glad I didn't bring the brownies, then."

"You made brownies?" His eyebrows waved.

"Er, kind of." I scratched behind my ear.

"How are you, anyway?" he asked.

"I feel like I should be asking you that."

"Why? It's no mystery how I am."

"You smell pretty bad," I said. I figured it was better than just thinking it.

He looked at me with his eyes widened and his mouth twitching. "Thanks."

"I'm sorry."

We both burst out laughing at once. I didn't think it was funny, but it seemed like I ought to do it.

"I'm fine," I said, finally. "Er. Fine. I asked if I could bring whiskey."

"Yeah." He looked at his knees. "I'm glad you could come. I didn't know if you'd be able to."

"I didn't think so, either. Er, Lily, James's wife helped me figure out a loophole."

"I know who Lily is. Tell her I said thanks. Er. I wanted to tell you. I mean, I'm sorry. For everything. I never got a chance to tell you. Do you know what I mean?" He popped his knuckles and his handcuffs rattled.

"You don't have to…"

"Yes, I do." He rubbed at his lip. "If it weren't for me, you know, you wouldn't have got in trouble."

"Let's face it, Reg, I'd've probably gone to jail for something else, anyway. Better for you than for my flying motorbike." I tried to smile.

"And more important, you wouldn't be-"

"Stop it, I'm serious."

I thought he would've taken the opportunity to make the obvious joke he always did, but he didn't seem to notice. "I can't," he said, "I think about it all the time."

"Well, don't. Look, _I'm_ sorry. If either of us is going to be sorry, it's going to be me." I felt my face getting red, and I wasn't sure why. "I'm sorry, I really am." I put my hand on his arm and just as quickly pulled away.

"Er." He put his hands up to his face. I could see his pulse in his neck, beating fast.

"So. You are eating, aren't you?" I felt like I had to say something. I only had thirty minutes.

"Yes," he said. "Sometimes." He looked back over at me. "Look, sometimes you just kind of lose your appetite. That's the same question Mum always asks, you know."

I had been trying to face front, but at that my head swiveled around towards him.

"Of course Mum and Dad have been to visit me," he said. "Mostly Mum. She comes every week." His voice was almost a whisper.

I turned back to the wall. "I'm glad," I said.

"I'm not." I could hear the frog in his throat. "It makes me feel worse, you know, if that's possible. How painful it is for her. She'd rather I was dead. And Dad's dying." He cleared his throat. "You know who else comes to visit?" He sped through that sentence, and his voice cracked. "Evan Rosier. Bellatrix and Narcissa even came once."

"They're not-what do they say to you?"

"Nothing. I know what you're thinking. Once, Evan said he wanted to talk to you."

"Oh yeah?" I tried to sound surprised.

"I told him to stay the hell away from you. I told him I'd find out if he came anywhere near you and kill him myself. What the fuck do I have to lose? I think he was just fucking around. Not that-but he hasn't tried to find you, has he?"

"No," I said as fast as I could. "Why are you so worried about it?"

"Fuck, you know. I don't know, he's psychotic. I just want him to leave you alone."

"Don't worry, I think I could handle Rosier if I needed to."

"Well." He tented his fingers over his knees.

For a minute we sat in silence. We both leaned back against the wall at the same time. He held his hands together on his chest. His shoulder brushed mine.

I put my hand on the back of his neck and pushed my fingers into his hair. When we were little. When he was just a baby, when he was lying in his cot, on his belly, I would rub the back of his neck and pull my fingers through his knot of black hair. Our mother would hold me over him when it was bedtime, so I could kiss his forehead goodnight.

"You probably don't remember I used to do this," I said, picking through a tangle. His hair was longer than he liked to keep it, matted in thick clumps. "You were just a baby."

He shook his head.

"I was probably a better big brother when I was three than ever since."

"Too bad I was too busy having no long-term memory to appreciate it."

I closed my eyes and tilted my head back. My hand was still on his neck.

I never missed our childhood, but I did then.

"Have you talked to Mum and Dad? You know, since everything?" I still had my eye closed, but I could tell he was looking at me.

"Erm. No."

"Well, I didn't think so," he said. And after another second: "Can I ask you a favor?"

I tensed and opened my eye.

"I know you won't like it," he said. "But just try, once, to talk to them. It kills me to know they're all alone when-when Dad-" He put his hands over his mouth and closed his eyes.

I instinctively put my arms around him and pulled him close to me.

"Say you'll do it," he said. "Please." His backbone stuck out under my fingers.

"Okay. I'll try." I didn't want to let him go, even though he was fidgeting with his fingers, and I could hear the guard coming down the hall.

"Sirius," he said. His eyes shot to the barred door. His mouth hung open for a second. "I-"

"Time's up." The guard rapped on the bars with his knuckles.

Regulus stood up, but I pulled him back down. "What? What were you saying?"

He looked nervously at the guard.

"Come on, I don't have all day," the guard said.

I ignored him still. "Reg-"

"It's nothing," he said quick, standing up again. "Just, I miss you."

* * *

_A/n: Auuugh I am late with this one. I feel like I actually had something to say in my author's notes this time, but now I don't remember what it was... Instead, I'll just complain about how hard it is to find the right emotional balance in this shit ugh._

_OH and WAY more important, thank you everyone who's reading and adding to watch lists and faves, and especially everyone who's reviewing! You guys give me life.  
_


	6. Chapter 6

When I got back home, James and Lily were waiting. Both of them eyed me with apprehension.

"You know," I said, pouring myself a glass of water. I drank it and drew another one before I could finish my sentence. "You know, they take the things people bring him." I held the glass in front of me with two shaking hands. I flexed my mouth, trying to open it without the tendons in my neck pulling taut.

"They won't even give him some goddamn sandwiches." My voice rose. "He's in there starving, and they're eating his fucking sandwiches."

I heard glass shatter across the room, and Lily jumped in her chair. James put his hand on her shoulder. My hands were empty.

"I-I'm sorry. I just-"

"That's horrible," Lily said at once. "It's criminal if they're taking food meant for Regulus. It's cruel."

James pointed his wand at the shattered glass, and just as quickly as it had broken, it was back on the worktop in one piece, and the spilled water vanished from the floor. "Next time you go, we'll find a way to smuggle things in," he said.

I took a deep breath. "You didn't see him in there. He's in there suffering, and I can't do anything to make it better. I never did anything to make it better. I can't even bring him a goddamn cheese sandwich."

Lily looked like a deer caught in the headlights. It was one thing she knew she couldn't fix, either. She looked scared.

"I know it seems unfair," James said. He was trying to catch my eye.

"More than seems that way."

James put his hand on my arm. "I know. I know. I wish I could help, but-"

I pulled away from him. "Do you? Do you really? You never liked Regulus; you didn't want me to help him. What does it matter to you-"

"Now, that's not fair." Lily jabbed her finger at me.

James just looked hurt.

I put my hands up and took a step back. "I have to go."

I left before they could say anything. I went out the back and took my motorbike.

Five minutes later, I was on the road, swerving around yowling housecoats and flipping off motorists who blew their horns at me. I didn't know where I was going, but I did know I couldn't stay in that house with James and Lily anymore. I felt bad, already, for how I'd treated them. But I was right, wasn't I? James never had liked Regulus, never mind that I hadn't liked him either until a few months ago, but I couldn't imagine him feeling bad that Regulus was in Azkaban being cheated out of his goddamn sandwiches.

I pounded on the handlebar with my fist, and the bike swerved in its lane, eliciting more horn hooting from oncoming traffic.

Something about the sandwiches, that it was something as stupid, frankly as humiliating as sandwiches, set me off. Thank god I hadn't brought the brownies, honestly. If I were like this over brownies. The fucking sandwiches were bad enough.

The point was, the ultimate point, was that I couldn't go back and apologize to them. Not now. Maybe not ever.

I didn't know where I was going, but I reckon I thought I'd end up at my flat.

That is not where I ended up.

I ended up outside Number 12, Grimmauld Place.

* * *

Kreacher answered the door.

His customary, scraping welcome, "Welcome to the House of Black," became a strangled kind of snarl as he straightened from his bow and saw me. "What is the blood traitor doing here?" he mumbled to himself.

"I can hear you, you know? And Regulus sent me." I pushed past Kreacher. "You remember Regulus, don't you, you little creep?"

"Master Sirius is not fit to be saying Master Regulus's name." Kreacher was still snarling, but he didn't seem to be able to do anything about me walking in and making myself at home. Reckon I'd never been officially disinherited, after all.

"Well." I couldn't help it. I turned to Kreacher with a smile on my face. "Won't it please you to know Master Regulus will be in Azkaban until long after your miserable life is over? And all because Master Regulus saved Master Sirius's life."

"Master Regulus was always kind to animals."

"Kreacher, did you just make a joke?" I actually laughed at the little twerp. He scowled hatefully, like he was suppressing the urge to bite me.

"Are Mum and Dad home?" I asked, turning away from him and walking towards the stairs.

"No," Kreacher hissed. "If the blood traitor swine knew anything, he would know Master is ill and-" Kreacher straightened up and his face took on a blankly subservient visage. This must be the official line he was told to deliver "-Master and Mistress Black will be unable to receive visitors at this time, but if you would like to leave a calling card, Mistress Black will be happy to call on you soon."

"Okay. That's fine. Now, where does Mum keep her address book…" I put my hand on the newel at the bottom of the stairs and squinted around the entry hall.

"Is Kreacher excused?" Kreacher muttered. He was edging towards the door leading off towards the kitchens.

"No way. Oh, I have an idea." I snapped my fingers. "Kreacher, I command you to show me where mother keeps her rolodex." I leaned down, so I was eye-level with him. "If you don't know what that word is, it's a list of all Mum's evil friends and where to find them."

Kreacher expelled a shuddering and putrid breath in my face, but bowed all the same and said, "Right this way, Master Sirius."

I followed Kreacher through the sitting room and into the back of the house. Mother's study was in the far corner, a dark little room with one bay window leaning out into the rose garden.

Kreacher's arms shook and his teeth clenched as he reached up for Mum's desk and opened the drawer. While I was watching him root through Mum's papers, his face pained and eyes teary, I remembered what Regulus had told me, those months ago. How Kreacher had gone with him to the cave, how Kreacher had pleaded with him not to do it, how Kreacher had taken the locket and done all he could to destroy it.

He finally found the little leather notebook and thrust it at me. I took it out of his hands. "Don't worry, I'll put it back when I'm done," I said.

"Is Kreacher excused now?"

"Er. Yes. I'll show myself out." I felt embarrassed all of a sudden, with him there.

Once he was out of the room, I sat down at Mum's desk and tore off a corner of a piece of parchment on which she had scribbled some sums. I dipped her quill in ink and opened the notebook to the Rs. Rathkopf, Renner, Rookwood, Rosier.

* * *

I didn't know what I was thinking. Rosier-Evan Rosier-was a grown man and he could be anywhere, creeping people out on his own time. There was no real reason for him to hang around his parents' house, when there was a whole world of people out there feeling comfortable and at their ease without him.

The real Rosier-Evan's father, Michel Rosier-was likely to be home, and from what I'd heard, likely to be murderous.

So maybe that's why I was sitting in the bushes across the street, trying to ignore the feeling that there were bugs crawling in my jeans. I wished James were here. If he had bugs crawling in his jeans, he'd be crying about it much more than I was.

I'd been crouched outside the Rosier house for going on an hour, now. So far I'd only seen a woman, either his mum or one of his innumerable spinster sisters, opening the curtains in the front window. Then a few minutes later, a pair of women, both dressed in black, left out the front walk and vanished in the nearest alleyway. Then nothing.

I felt something squirming around my hairline. I was going to get bugs in my bandages, and they were going to lay eggs in my open wounds and eat my flesh.

I had to do something. I stood up and flipped my jacket collar up to try and hide my face. I thought it wasn't wise to go straight in the Rosiers' front door, so I went around the block to find the house backing theirs up. I went over their hedges and into their back garden, where I stood at the back hedge pondering what kind of protective spells the house might have, and how I could subvert them.

Then I thought, well, there was one easy way to see how thoroughly they were protecting their house.

I glanced back at the house behind me. I didn't think anyone was home. There had been no car in the drive, and all the curtains were drawn. Given the state of the back garden-lots of fragile-looking statuettes and flowers, no swings or tricycles-this was either my parents' second home, or the house of someone with no children. My guess was an elderly couple, or maybe just an older woman.

Well, I sincerely hoped she wasn't home.

I went to the back door and tried the knob. It was locked, but it never hurt to try. I didn't dare use _Alohomora_. This wasn't a wizarding neighborhood, and just like the Ministry could track the use of magic, so could private homeowners. I wasn't sure it was strictly legal, but a lot of people did it. The Blacks certainly did. I wasn't taking any chances with the Rosiers.

So, instead, I had to try and jimmy the lock. I rubbed my hands together and stood considering the door for maybe five minutes, kneeling down and peering at the crack between the door and frame, trying to think where I could get a screwdriver to just take the knob off, etc. Then I just broke the window with my elbow and flipped the locks from inside.

I was pretty sure no one heard. I waited until what sounded like a truck went by on the street to break the glass.

Once I was inside, my suspicions that this was the house of an older, probably widowed woman were all but confirmed. The furniture and appliances were all about twenty years out of date, and there was a huge quantity of fabric flowers around.

I was dodging photographs of grandchildren halfway through the sitting room to the fireplace when it hit me.

Muggles don't have fucking Floo Powder.

It was about that time I heard the police sirens.

I turned and sprinted out the back door, but from there I didn't know what to do. I tried to Disapparate, but it appeared the Rosiers' Apparition shield extended into their neighbor's garden. I really didn't want to have to hex a bunch of Muggle policemen and find some way to clean up the mess.

So, I did the only sensible thing I could think of: I blasted a hole in the back hedge and dove through it, into the Rosiers' back garden.

* * *

_A/n: This one is real short, sorry!_


	7. Chapter 7

I tumbled head-over-heels into the grass. By the time I had realized which direction was up, and that I had not been vaporized on contact with the border of the Rosiers' property, Evan Rosier was standing over me with his wand out.

"Sirius! What a pleasant surprise." I watched that awful shark smile spread across his face. I didn't even get the pleasure of seeing him startled. He accio-ed my wand before I could get my hand around it. Then he stuck out his hand and pulled me to my feet. Behind me, I could hear branches crunching against one another: the hedge growing back into place.

Evan looked up and cocked his head, as though he were on the scent of something. "Are those for you?"

Oh. He was listening to the sirens. They sounded like they were just pulling up outside the house backing up the Rosiers'.

I dusted off my jeans. "Er."

"Never mind. Not important. I'm so glad you finally came to see me."

"Well. I've been to see Re-my brother," I said. I felt like just being here, I might as well be taking the Dark Mark. I pressed my back against the hedge.

"Fantastic. I would invite you in, as I think we've a lot to talk about, but I'm otherwise occupied at the moment." He took a step back, and I noticed that he, like the two witches I'd seen earlier, was dressed all in black. "You see, my father recently passed away. Which is how you were able to get through that hedge without dying." He laughed. "Right now I'm trying to reestablish our protective spells so passersby don't make a habit of blasting holes in our hedge and invading our home."

"Well, I didn't think I ought to just march up to the front door. I thought your father might kill me."

Evan nodded. "He certainly would have. When would be a good time for me to come bursting into your back garden during a loved one's wake?"

I almost laughed out loud at that. His smile hadn't faltered one bit. I don't know why I kept expecting it to.

"Before you say anything, that question was rhetorical." He snapped his fingers and a little scrap of parchment appeared between them. Back in school, he'd been fond of stupid Muggle-type tricks like that. Strange for someone who purportedly hated Muggles so much. I couldn't imagine it didn't drive my brother mad. "This time I expect you to pay."

"Expect all you want," I muttered, examining the card, which came with an unfamiliar address and tomorrow's date, noon.

"That's just what Regulus would say." Rosier took a deep breath and his chest swelled.

"Mmm. Okay. I'm gonna go now. Out the front, if I may."

"You could use the Floo if you're worried about the Muggles." The curious expectation in his voice was more than my pride could take.

"I'll be fine," I said.

And I was.

The fact that I happened to be, as was typical, dressed primarily in black, anyway made me as inconspicuous as was possible for someone with a mummy's face.

I started feeling numb and kind of prickly all over before I even gone to the end of his front walk. I may not have seen Rosier's Dark mark, but I knew he was a Death Eater, and his father had been widely feared, both as a ruthless businessman and a temperamental and violent person. I was thrilled when I heard he died. I couldn't' wait to tell James and the rest of the Order.

Only, I wasn't sure when I could speak to James normally again, and besides that, I was sure Dumbledore was probably already informing those who "needed to know".

I wasn't someone who needed to know most things.

I reckon Rosier was right. I was starting to sound like my brother.

I went back to my flat. Something about having gone to the Rosiers' made it seem impossible to go back to James and Lily's, like I had betrayed them.

My flat looked dirty, and not because of the accumulated dust, of which there was a lot. Not that I would have ever noticed that before. The point was that it seemed dirty compared to James and Lily's.

I kind of liked it.

I kicked off my boots at the door, and they hit the back of the sofa, leaving muddy marks on the upholstery.

It smelled like me in here, like months of accumulated me, or like my dirty clothes, anyway. There were still empty beer bottles all over the coffee table from that night Regulus and I got sloshed waiting for Dumbledore summon us to Hogwarts.

I threw my jacket across the living room. It knocked over about half the bottles on the table.

I turned on the TV and realized I'd left my painkillers at James and Lily's, too.

The potion wore off a couple hours after I got to my flat. I was surprised, to be frank, that the pain still existed, underneath. Normally, I didn't even wait for the first twinges to take my next dose.

It was like some unholy orchestra of pain, starting off with some tiny little annoying woodwinds that built up to a full brass section crescendo, in which the cymbals were crashing down on each ear. My nonexistent left eye felt like it was being squeezed out of its socket with a pair of needle-nose pliers.

I was shocked by how sudden and intense the onset was. I sat on the sofa and stared at the TV, blinking rarely. I tried to focus on anything on the television, but after watching it for some time, I still didn't know what kind of program was on. I could recall some snippets, mostly jingles from the commercials, which by virtue of being louder and more insistent on themselves seemed to have an easier time penetrating my consciousness.

I got to the toilet to throw up. I didn't notice the bile that must have been trapped under my bandages until later. I put my forehead down on the toilet seat and clenched my jaw shut. My heart beat a rapid tattoo on my eardrums.

It wasn't that I was angry with them, with James and Lily. If anything, I expected them to be angry with me. But it was pathetic, wasn't it, to run to them for help. I'd known that all along.

Maybe if I just went to my Healer and explained I'd lost the last of the potion and needed to renew the prescription.

No, she would think I was abusing it, or selling it to schoolchildren or something. She already thought I was some kind of delinquent street fighter. For god's sake, she'd met me in jail; I was surprised she trusted me with the stuff in the first place.

I grabbed a bucket from under the sink and dragged it back to the sofa with me.

I wanted to apologize to James and Lily, but every time I thought about Flooing them, my pulse quickened and the sweat flowed from my pores.

When I bought my TV, I did it mostly as a Muggle affectation, a kind of novelty. It was good company for times like now. I like hearing human voices. Sometimes I could even make out what they were saying. Things about cat food.

I didn't know how long I'd been lying there when I picked out, apart from the noise of the television, footsteps on the landing outside.

I rolled and pushed myself into a sitting position. I didn't know where my wand was. After what happened last time, James had fixed up the protections I'd had on the flat. But that was only temporary. I needed to do it all over again myself, but I hadn't got around to it.

I couldn't stand up straight. I pulled myself along the wall, hunchbacked, to the kitchen. My wand was on the breakfast table. I heard a shuffling sound outside the door. And a knock.

Oh. I picked up the wand and made the same slow progress around to walls to the door. By the time I made it there, there had been several more knocks.

"Sirius, are you home? It's me." James.

I was too tired to do anything but take that statement at face value. I unlatched the door. If I got killed right now, it might not be so bad.

"Hey, I just-er, are you okay?"

I was looking at the floor in front of my feet, so I couldn't see his face. But I could guess what it looked like.

"Er. I think I have the flu. Do you want to come in?" I shuffled out of the way, and James helped me back to the sofa.

"Wow, you're really sweating," he said. He sat down on the chair next to the sofa, and I closed my eye. "You, er. You left your medicine at the house. At Lily and my-well. Anyway, I brought it." I heard glass clinking on the coffee table. "I think that's probably, I mean, if I were to guess, what's making you sick."

"What?"

"Withdrawal symptoms."

"Oh." I laughed, and I had to throw up in the bucket. It smelled really bad.

"Okay, that's gross, Padfoot, are you done? Lily thought you might feel sick," he said. "She also wanted me to tell you, you should try to wean yourself off, when you stop taking them. Gradual, you know. But that you should take more now. Er. I mean, not more, but some."

In a few minutes, my face stopped hurting, and my head, stomach, and achy muscles followed shortly. I kept sweating and feeling clammy for a while.

"There's got to be a potion to cure that stuff. That withdrawal stuff," I said. I was still lying on the sofa with my eye closed.

"Then you'd just have withdrawal from the second potion."

"Do you want to watch something?"

"Okay."

I don't remember what we watched, not even what it was called. I was happy that James was there, but I didn't know what to say. I was happy to sit there not saying anything. James kept up a running commentary on whatever it was we were watching. I was happy to hear him talk.

After a while, I remembered I needed to change my bandages. James had brought the stuff, and between the two of us, we managed to get fresh ointment and dressings on me.

When he was done forcing the metal clasp into the bandages, he stepped away and pushed his glasses back up his nose.

"Okay. I suppose I ought to go home."

"Yeah." I turned to the refrigerator and pushed around the lonely jar of mayonnaise as though I thought I might find something interesting behind it somewhere. "Well, I'll see you soon."

"Yeah. Er. Stop by whenever. Let me know if you need anything."

"Yeah, same here. I mean. Ditto."

"Okay, well. Bye."

I held the jar of mayonnaise tight in my hands until after the door shut behind him.

* * *

The address on the card Rosier gave me belonged to a Muggle chip shop in an unfashionable part of town.

I took my motorbike there. I was nervous about Apparating too close to him. I took the bike to about a mile away, parked it somewhere discreet, walked the rest of the way, got there about thirty minutes early, and waited across the street behind a newspaper until I saw him walk in.

Then, for good measure, I waited another ten minutes and circled the block before I went in.

He was dressed in black trousers and a black waistcoat, with a bright green tie, just waiting to get mugged. I reckoned whoever tried that would regret it. He was staring out the window, a basket of chips in front of his folded arms. His fingers twisted a toothpick between them. I was sure he'd seen me approach before I even came in the door, but he made no indication of having noticed me until I came up behind him and said hello. I had my hand stuffed in my pocket around my wand, just in case.

He always looked so happy to see me. "Hi! Sirius." He always said my name when he greeted me, too.

I took a step back.

"We have a lot of things to discuss," he said. It didn't look like he had touched the basket of chips.

I took the seat opposite him.

"Does anyone know you're here?" he asked.

"No. You told my brother you wanted to talk to me."

"Why not?" The chip shop was dim and smoky, but his eyes glinted as if catching an invisible light. "He's not going to say anything."

"I'm not worried about him saying anything, you twat. I'm worried about him." I twisted my mouth. "Well, worrying. He threatened to kill you, you know, if you tried to talk to me."

He didn't respond, not right away. He was smiling, different from his typical shark smile. It didn't even seem like he was smiling at me. "That sounds like him."

I bit the insides of my lips. "Look, just stop talking to my brother about me. You're scaring him. He thinks you mean me harm."

"I wouldn't give him that impression, he knows-"

"Don't say you told him about your absurd plan."

"Well, I didn't go into details."

"Don't you fucking dare. Ever again." I grabbed his jacket sleeve.

"Well, Sirius, we're going to have to tell him eventually." Rosier blinked. He looked like he really didn't understand what he had done wrong.

"We don't now we're doing anything yet."

His brow creased. "Well, what are you doing here, if we're not doing anything?"

I put my hands in my hair and scratched at my scalp. My fingernails caught in my bandages, and he had to help me right them.

"Okay, stop. Now." I pushed away his hand, which was spending an inappropriate amount of time on my cheek. "I don't know why I'm here. Of course I want to help Regulus. You've seen the way it is in there. But this is mad."

Evan's eyes bugged. "I was not led to believe you were the cowardly type."

"Excuse me."

"If I know the half of what you and your friends got up to at school, I would've thought you'd take a risk like that for your brother." His sharp chin lowered and his curls fell over his face.

"Don't pretend to know me." I wanted to hit him, but instead just took a handful of chips.

"I don't. But Regulus does. He always talked about you. He would've died for you, and he almost did. He didn't have to go to Azkaban. But he did. For you."

"It's not a matter of what I'm willing to do. It's a matter of what's possible. What you want to do is not possible."

Evan tilted his head. "We haven't even come up with a plan, and you already think it's impossible."

I put my hands on the table in front of me. "How long has Azkaban been in existence?"

He cracked his knuckles. "Well, the original site has moved, of course, but the institution has existed since 1134, and the current site since 1429. With minimal restorations and repairs. Weathering is an issue due to its location-"

"Okay, Encyclopedia Brown."

Rosier smiled and his eyes seemed to pulse. "Who? I got all Os on my OWLs and NEWTs. I'm better at the Dark Arts than anyone I know, and I know a lot of Death Eaters."

"When has anyone ever broken out of Azkaban? In its 1,846 years of existence? Even people who made all Os on their NEWTs."

"Never." The shark smile was back.

"So, what makes you think-"

"Stop. Statistically, it's not likely."

"It's a 2,000 year precedent. Built by generations of wizards all more powerful and more inventive than either of us."

"I think 'more powerful' is a subjective judgment."

I laughed. "How do I know you're not trying to trick me? For whatever sick reason." I picked up the vinegar bottle and shook a little into my palm.

"If I wanted to kill you, wouldn't I have done it when you fell into my back garden?" He grabbed my fingers and licked the vinegar off my palm.

I kicked his shin with my heel under the table and pushed him backwards. He almost fell over, but caught himself on the table behind him.

"Sorry."

"Don't fucking do that. I know you're a fucking creep. I know you live to creep people the fuck out, but I will hurt you."

He threw his head back and laughed. "Okay. Sorry. You just remind me of him."

"I don't want to know what that means, and if you want me to help you with anything, or even just not take your damn head off, you'll stop making those comparisons."

"Okay. The first thing we need to do-" His eyes shifted down, and he folded his arms one on top of another. "-Of course, given that Azkaban is unplottable, is figure out how to plot it."

"Shall I get a row boat and head out to the North Sea?"

"Well, it's not the worst idea you've had. You're right that it's probably in the North Sea." He pulled out paper and pen from under the table and set it down between us. "We've both been there. It may be unplottable, but its security isn't infallible. You've seen the idiots they hire as guards. It's the dregs of society who get sent there. Why would they need competent human guards when they have Dementors? They just need people to lock doors and press panic buttons."

"Are you suggesting we get a guard to tell us how to find the place?" He had started scribbling something on the paper. I looked around for a waitress or someone who might bring me a beer.

"Yes. How long did you talk to them, when you were there?"

"Maybe fifteen, twenty minutes. Including the time they spent groping me. I'm sure you enjoy that bit."

He looked up at me, showing his canines. "You can learn a lot about a person in twenty minutes once a week."

I didn't believe Rosier knew much about people at all, but I did believe he could suck a person dry of useful information in that much time.

"I think they probably have some kind of protections put in place," I muttered behind my hand, "to keep those idiots, as you say, from spilling the beans. Or maybe they don't know at all. Maybe they take Portkeys, like we do."

"Well, someone's got to set those Portkeys up. Someone's got to know." He didn't look up. "Of course someone's got to know. It's probably easiest to start with the idiots."

"What do you mean by start? How do you mean to ask them?"

"It's all about making friends. That's a convenient way to phrase it." He scratched out something with his pen, lips pursed and eyebrow twitching. "I already have one. His name is Benedict Sherman. He lives in Dagenham. Alone. We support the same team, you know?" He laughed.

I knew he didn't give a fuck about Quidditch. He'd been one of the few students, back at Hogwarts, who almost never came to matches. "So, you think he's gonna help you break into the place cos he thinks you like the Chudley Cannons?" I laughed. That was an image.

"No. But one day maybe I'll invite him out to a pub." Evan shrugged. "Maybe he'll even invite me."

"What if he invites you to a match?" I couldn't stop myself giggling.

"I think I could learn the rules."

"Oh, right, cos you got all Os on your NEWTs, I almost forgot." I finally saw someone who looked like a waiter. I waved my arm. "Excuse me, can I get a coffee and a beer, please?"

He gave me a kind of half-nod, half-shrug and walked back to the kitchen.

"Look, I don't think you're planning on just getting a little drunk and hoping his lips loosen."

"Well, getting him drunk is a start, but no, I would rely on surer methods." He scratched the end of his nose with his pen.

The waiter put the cup of coffee and the beer down by my elbow. "Must have been some fight, mate." He was gone by the time I turned around.

"If you want to test a different strategy, you could try with your own guard." While I was still blowing across the top of the coffee, he picked up the mug and gulped down half of it in one go.

"Does Azkaban have a director or something? Like a warden?" I examined the rest of the coffee in the cup. I was unsure that I wanted to drink after him. Especially when he'd just licked my palm, and I hadn't washed my hands all day.

"Sort of. Not a warden in the traditional sense. He's rarely there. His office is at the Ministry."

"Well, who is he?"

"Linus Stillwater." Rosier stared at the notebook in front of him, as though he were getting answers there. "I think we have a better chance with the guards, though. Idiots though they may be, they probably know more than he does." He pushed his fingers through his hair. A few of his curls got tangled together and stuck upright at the crown of his head.

"Well, let me know when you get something useful out of a guard, then." I drank my beer.

"Okay, that's our first goal, then." He circled something with his pen.

"Don't kidnap anyone."

"Look, I said you could do it your way, and I'd-"

"I can't tell if you're joking, but I just want to put a stopper in that right now."

"Well-"

"You don't think people would be a bit suspicious if an Azkaban guard went missing?" I pushed the coffee cup toward him.

"Well, that's why I try being friendly, first." He hunched over the notebook and pen, and when he straightened up again, the stationery was gone.

"I can't be seen with you."

"Right." He snapped his fingers again and produced another card. "Meet me here Friday."

I took the card but didn't look at it. "I think maybe I ought to pick the place."

"Do you have any ideas?"

I hesitated.

"Okay, no. You can pick the next one. Make a list or something. Muggle places, chains and cheap food places, preferably, somewhere you've never heard of. In fact, just show me your list next time." He tapped the card. "Here, Friday, 1:30."

"Fine, whatever." I finished the last of the chips.


	8. Chapter 8

Wednesday was the Order meeting. The meeting places were always secret until the day of. I don't even know how Dumbledore knew where I was, but I got an owl at my flat that morning, with cryptic directions to a Portkey set to leave at 6:30 from a skip on the Muggle side of the Leaky Cauldron.

I was getting better at wrapping my own bandages, but mostly now, I was just going largely without. I still hadn't looked myself full in the face without bandages on. The only mirror in my flat was the one over the bathroom sink.

I showered before I went to the meeting and brought a bottle of wine with me, and my painkillers in my pocket. The meeting ended up being at Emmeline Vance's parents' house. They were dead, but she still had the house.

The Portkey dropped me out about half-a-mile from the house, in a dead pasture. I had to climb over a fence on my way in. My jeans snagged and ripped at the hem.

As I came upon the house, I saw dim shapes approaching from other directions. "Hullo!" I stuck my arm up and waved.

Some of the figures waved back, and I heard some noises of greeting, but nothing intelligible.

When I knocked on the door, Gideon Prewett answered. He yelled something at me, wrapped me up in his arms, lifted me off my feet and passed me off to his brother.

Fabian set me back down on the ground and clapped me on the shoulder. "Good to see you, mate," he said. By that time, the others had started arriving in the door, and Fabian turned back to them. I straightened and smoothed my clothes, and realized that one of the twins had taken the bottle out of my hand. I was still staring back at them, trying to figure out when they'd done it and what they'd done with it, when Emmeline came up from behind me and touched me on the elbow.

"Hi, Sirius."

"Hi, Emmeline." I turned to look at her. She was dressed in a full green skirt, and she had a broad smile on her square face. "I brought something for you, but I think I just got pickpocketed."

She laughed. "Oh, they've been doing that to everyone. I'm sure yours will turn up."

"You'll know it when you see it, it's the most expensive one here."

She laughed again and started pinning her dark hair back up as it escaped from the bun at the back of her head. "Well, most people are gathering in the sitting room. Lily and James are in there, I think. I just have a few things left to finish up in the kitchen."

"If you could use some help, I'd be happy to give it," I said.

"Well, it's mostly just putting things on plates," she said. "Do you think you can handle that?"

I did. Emmeline had been in Ravenclaw. I hadn't known her very well in school-she was a couple years older than me. She was also a staff assistant with the Wizengamot now. She probably worked on our case-mine and Regulus's.

"How've you been doing?" she asked.

I was arranging a couple dozen deviled eggs in a circle on a platter.

"Oh, fine," I said. I accidentally stuck my thumb in the deviled part of a deviled egg. "Oh, sorry, I think this one needs more paprika." I stuck my thumb in my mouth and licked it clean.

Emmeline passed me the little jar of paprika. She was winding pieces of prosciutto around melon balls. "I thought you would've come with James and Lily," she said. She pressed down on the prosciutto with her finger and skewered the ball with a toothpick. "Aren't you staying with them?"

I cleared my throat and moved over to start work on assembling the cucumber finger sandwiches, for which Emmeline had always prepared the ingredients. It was a testament to Emmeline's upbringing that she was still devoted to the traditional hors d'oeuvres spread. "I was until recently."

"Oh, I didn't know you left."

I just nodded and smeared mayonnaise on the little bread triangles Emmeline had cut.

"You know, I don't know how much this means. But I really admire what you did for your brother," she said. I looked at her, but she was staring down at the melon balls, not working, just twisting a few toothpicks between her fingers. "I don't have any siblings. But if I did, I like to think I would've done the same thing." She picked up the tray of finished, prosciutto-wrapped melon balls. "But fair warning, I don't think everyone feels the same way I do." She left the kitchen and me holding slices of cucumber in my hands.

I took my time getting the sandwiches together. Emmeline came back into the kitchen. "I didn't mean that to sound so ominous. I just didn't want you to be blind-sided. Are you okay?"

"Yes." I bit my tongue between my teeth.

"Okay, well, thank you for your help. Whenever you're ready, you can bring that in. I think we're almost ready to start." She smoothed her hands down over her hair, straightened her skirt, and picked up the plate of deviled eggs.

I followed her at a distance.

James, Lily, Peter, and Remus were already in the sitting room. I put the tray I was carrying down on the coffee table. James had left a seat open beside him. It was one of those chintz armchairs that were Dumbledore's trademark. I didn't look around for him. I just sat down in the chair next to James.

"Hey."

He put his arm on my shoulder. "Hey."

Lily leaned around him. "Hey."

I waved at her and Peter and Remus. Then I looked straight ahead, where, thankfully, I didn't have to make eye contact with anyone. I could see, on my right-hand side, where I still had peripheral vision, Frank and Alice, but I couldn't see anyone to my left, which is where the majority of the people in the room were sitting.

I felt James's breath on my neck. "Don't pay attention to Fenwick. No one else does," he whispered.

"What?" I turned to face him. I saw Fenwick, incidentally, over James's shoulder. He wasn't looking at me, but he had a kind of sneer on his lizard face as he talked to Fabian.

"Oh, I thought you knew."

"What should I know?"

"Well, he's friends with Emmeline, isn't he and-"

"What did he say?"

"He's an idiot, first of all, and no one-"

"Just tell me, James."

"He's been saying he doesn't believe that you weren't in contact with Regulus before. And that maybe they attacked you, personally, because you'd been one of them. Or, involved in some way."

"That's insane," I said.

"I know that and so does everyone else. No one-well, he's the only one I know of who thinks you had anything to do with the Death Eaters. Dumbledore'll tell him off."

"What do other people say?"

"Most people know you're telling the truth. I don't know."

"Yeah you do."

"I really don't know anything else than Frank and Alice said some people didn't think you ought to have helped him. Knowing he was a Death Eater."

"Dumbledore was fucking there. So were you. He told us what to do."

"Look, okay, I know. I think most people know. Everyone should know."

"You had meetings when I wasn't here, didn't you? Didn't he say anything, then? Didn't anyone bring it up?"

James scratched behind his ear. "I don't think so."

"Don't you think you would fucking remember?"

"Sometimes I don't pay too much attention." He laughed.

I leaned around him. Lily was already taking notes on her lap. "Lily, did Dumbledore ever say anything about me at a meeting? While I was in jail or anything?"

"No." She didn't look up from her notebook.

"Well, I didn't think so," James said.

"If he's not going to, then I will."

"You should," James said.

"I don't think that's a good idea," said Lily.

"Why not?"

"Don't waste time." She looked up at me. "What some idiots think isn't important. Let it go. Dumbledore would address it if it needed to be addressed, but we have a lot to talk about tonight. We need to get through it. And besides, maybe there's a reason he wants people to think that way."

"Well, if that's the case, he might tell me about it." I jammed my finger in my mouth and chewed on a hangnail.

"I can't think of any good reason why people shouldn't know the truth," James said.

I felt a surge of affection for him.

"Besides, the fact that it's the truth, it's not fair to make Sirius some kind of pariah, which is what this kind of affirmation by omission is doing, by the way."

"Just save it for later, okay? Owl him or something." Lily kept her nose in her notebook. "Your scars are looking better, Sirius."

"Er. Thanks."

James laughed.

Moody walked in and James stopped laughing. I saw Emmeline wince. She was probably thinking how his boots were scarring the hardwood.

"Let's quit wasting time," he said out the corner of his mouth. I reached over and pretended to point out something in Lily's notebook, but just pinched her on the arm. He took a seat in one of the empty chintz armchairs nearest the door. A moment later, Dumbledore followed him.

I felt rather than saw James straighten up beside me. "Good evening, everyone," Dumbledore said. He picked up a prosciutto-wrapped melon ball and popped it in his mouth as though the whole room had not fallen silent as soon as he opened his mouth. "The hors d'oeuvres are delicious, Emmeline. Thank you for your hospitality." The rest of us followed with hurried and muttered "thank yous".

"I think we would do best to begin with report-backs," he said, folding his hands on his crossed legs. "Emmeline, as our hostess, won't you do us the honor of beginning?"

She would, of course. While Emmeline was talking about cases going through the Wizengamot and gossip among the justices, I looked over at Peter. The moisture on his forehead was obvious. I laughed to myself. He kept sending worried glances Moody's way.

I whispered in James's ear, "Tell Peter to calm down. At least half the room doesn't think he's a Death Eater."

Lily heard me, and she tapped the toe of her shoe on the floor. I knew this was meant as a threat.

Lily took notes all the way through report-backs, but I had a hard time paying attention to, or even really caring in the abstract, about these projects, the majority of which were largely clerical in nature. I was glad I wasn't sitting next to Lily, who kept shooting me horrible looks when I slumped in my chair and fidgeted with the zips on my jacket.

Finally, Dumbledore spoke up again. "Now that we're all up to speed, might I suggest we move on to plans for future action?" His fingers were closing around a deviled egg.

Moody leaned forward with his elbows on his knees. "Though it has not been confirmed by the family, we have it on good authority that Michel Rosier, president of the board of directors of the Markham-Rosier Corporation, has died."

I sat up straight.

"The man was never quiet about his support for an ideology very in keeping with Voldemort's, and it is my opinion, though, as I am often reminded, there was never enough concrete evidence to bring charges, that Rosier was one of Voldemort's first supporters and members of his inner circle. One of the original Death Eaters."

"He wouldn't ever call himself that," Gideon said. He squared his shoulders and put on a scowl. "Zis 'Death Eating', vat does eet mean?" He and Fabian laughed, and James cracked a grin and elbowed me in the ribs, but it didn't register with me that anything might have been funny.

Moody didn't think so, either. He didn't take his eyes off the Prewetts, and waited for them to quiet down before he continued. "We-Frank, Alice, other Aurors, and I-are of the opinion that Rosier may have come to a parting of the ways with Voldemort and paid the consequences for that. What remains to be seen is what happens with his position on the board of directors-"

"Doesn't he have a son?" Benjy Fenwick asked.

Moody's withering stare shifted to him. "He has one son. To whom we need to pay very close attention in the coming weeks, as he may or may not be assuming his father's position. And he more than likely has already followed his father's footsteps into the Death Eaters."

"I'll do it," I said. I looked straight at Moody, but I could feel the others' eyes on me. I imagined clocking Fenwick across his pointy, lizard jaw.

"Do what?" Moody asked. I was sure he knew. He was asking for the audience's benefit.

"I know you're going to suggest-well, you said we need to keep an eye on him. On Rosier. Evan Rosier. I'll do it; I'll keep an eye on him."

"Isn't Rosier friends with your brother?" Fenwick asked loudly.

I gritted my teeth and tried to ignore him.

"I was going to recommend something along those lines." Moody nodded. "What's your plan?"

"I know where he lives-or, I can find out. My mother knows the Rosiers. Well, we're related, they're cousins of my cousins. I know the family. It makes sense."

Moody kept nodding. I could tell he was thinking it over; it sounded all right to him so far. Alice and Frank looked intrigued, too.

"I'll help," James said. "Sirius will need someone to help."

"Well, I don't think I _need_ help, but thanks, James." I knew he was trying to head off more comments from Fenwick.

"I'd be happy too, as well." That was Emmeline. I turned to face her.

"Why?" I asked before I could stop myself.

She pinkened. "I'm just trying to help."

"Well, we don't need three people tied up in this." Moody took his flask out and took a long drink. Maybe he needed the time to think. When he was done, he wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. "Vance, you're already busy with the Wizengamot. Why don't Potter and Black take this one?"

Emmeline colored further and didn't respond. James said, "Yes, sir," and I rolled my eye and didn't say anything.

"Okay, well, if that's settled, you gentlemen can report back next time. Our next item of business is to do with recent reports of a so-called epidemic in Essex attacking exclusively Muggle-borns and their families."

I struggled to pay attention to the rest of the agenda. I knew it was important, and even interesting, but I kept sneaking glances at Fenwick, and more and more, at Emmeline.

When Moody finally finished up his closing vigilance screed, most everyone else remained in the sitting room, finishing up the hors d'oeuvres and pouring sherries.

I pulled James aside. "She did that to keep an eye on me."

"What? Emmeline?"

"Who the hell else would I be talking about, you twit? You said she's Fenwick's friend."

"Yeah, I see what you mean," he said. His eyes kept flitting over to the table with the wine and sherry.

"Well. That's bullshit."

"I agree."

"What makes me angriest is she just finished telling me earlier how she believed me and thought I did the right thing."

"Hmm. Maybe she just wanted to help, then." He scratched his nose.

"Maybe she wants me to think that. I think maybe she's trying to play me for Fenwick."

"Okay. That's a little paranoid, Padfoot."

"We've never said three words to each other before tonight, and now this."

"She only talked to you in the first place because you offered to help her make some snacks."

"Whose side are you on here?"

"I'm always on your side, but I have to tell you, it seems like you've teamed up with 'crazy' against 'nothing' on this one."

"As long as you've got my back. I think I'm due for a dose of painkillers."

"Let's get a drink and just forget the whole thing? I'm already annoyed about having to stake out Evan Rosier's house waiting for him to step out the front door in full Death Eater regalia, I suppose. Why did you volunteer for that? Was it because of Regulus? Do you think Rosier had anything to do with what happened to you?"

"No. No. I did it because I need something to do, you know? I'm tired of sitting around. We used to do things, remember?"

"Vaguely."

I went to the w.c. to take my painkillers, and when I came out, James had his arm around Lily by the drinks table.

I went out front and sat down on the lawn. After a minute, I went back in to get a drink, and then came back out. I figured I'd go home after I finished the drink, but I didn't want to just yet.

The Vance house was way out in the country, and the sky got truly dark out here, at least as dark as at Hogwarts. Probably darker. The castle itself probably gave off as much light as a small city.

When I was little, mother was really insistent about me learning to track the stars and know the constellations. It was easy to find Sirius, at least. Sirius was the brightest star in the sky.

I lay down on the lawn, cradling my head in one hand and my drink in the other. I never thought the stars were beautiful. I thought they were boring. I didn't care about seeing the stars. It wasn't the way Moony hated the moon, not exactly. It was obvious why he hated and feared the moon. But the way I felt was similar. I hated and feared the stars, too. But sometimes, if I didn't think about that, if I just looked up, I could see how they could strike one as magnificent. When you thought, they were so far away. They looked so cold, bright, and distant in the dark sky, but they burned so hot, hotter than you could imagine. And no one could touch them. No one ever had, and no one ever would.

I had been lying on the lawn for maybe twenty minutes when I heard the door open.

I sat up and turned around. Emmeline was walking towards me, straightening her skirt.

"What are you doing out here?" She pulled at her waistband, truing to get her hem straight.

"Nothing. What are you doing?" I stood up and dusted off my jeans.

It was dark, so I couldn't really see her face. She stopped about three feet before she got to me. She shrugged. "I don't know. People will probably be leaving soon. How do you think things went?"

I finished my drink and put the glass down in the grass by my feet. Her eyes darted towards it. "Fine. I'd probably better be getting home, too."

"Oh. Well. I really appreciated all your help tonight." She smoothed her hands down over her hair.

"I didn't really do that much."

"More than most people. And thank you for bringing wine."

"You're welcome."

"We found it eventually." She laughed.

"Good."

"Did you even get to taste it? I think there's some inside, still, if you wanted to."

"No, that's okay." I scratched the back of my neck. "I'm not really a wine person, anyway."

"Me neither. I mean, I loved the wine you brought. I had some. But I'm more of a whiskey girl."

I frowned, under the assumption she couldn't see me. "Me too." I didn't know what she was driving at, here. I took a step back and reconsidered going back for another drink.

"I thought you probably were. Look, I think you might have some mixed feelings about me. Mixed." She laughed. "I'd be surprised if you didn't hate me. Me working for the Wizengamot. But you have to know. I didn't have anything to do-I _never_ have anything to do with what goes on in court. I just manage calendars and have letters dictated to me."

"Hmm."

"Well. I just wanted to say that. I er, well, have a good night." She turned around to go, but before she'd got four steps, she stopped. She stood with her back to me, her toe tapping in the grass. Her hips twitched. "You know." She turned around. "You know, I volunteered to help you because I was trying to be nice."

"Not because Benjy Fenwick put you up to it." I kicked at my heel.

"Are you kidding me?" She jutted her chin out.

"You're friends, aren't you?"

"So, I have to think everything my friends think?"

"But he does think that. That I'm a Death Eater. That's not like a disagreement over where you're getting lunch."

"I warned you before this even started what he thought, and that I didn't share his opinion. Yes, I think he's wrong, and I've told you so."

"How am I expected to work with someone who thinks I'm some kind of murderer and spy? And how can he just sit there and not say anything, unless he's got some kind of other plan for me? To take care of me."

"Oh, so then I'm the spy?" She crossed her arms. "I know you're frustrated, but you're taking it out on the wrong person. I think Dumbledore's going to talk to Benjy. I mentioned it to him, anyway."

"He damn well better," I said. I looked down at my toes. I wasn't angry with her, though, and I couldn't keep yelling like I was. Her bringing up Dumbledore reminded me how impotent my argument with her was.

"Come back inside."

I bent down to pick up my empty sherry glass. "Why do you care?"

"Well, it matters to me that we all get along. We all have to trust each other, and I wish we knew each other better. I want to make sure you know you have a place here."

"Well, thanks. But I know where I belong. It'll take more than a prick like Fenwick to make me doubt that."

After Emmeline went back inside, I looked up at the stars again.


	9. Chapter 9

Investigating Evan Rosier was maybe something I should have stopped to consider before volunteering. It seemed like the only choice at the time, but every time James asked me about it and wanted to get together, I felt like death was breathing down my neck.

Finally, I had to stop dodging. I came over to the house one evening the next week.

I got there the same time as the take-away guy.

"The two people I wanted to see most in the world," James said when he opened the door.

"So, what's the plan?" he asked once we were settled on the living room floor with our boxes of curry.

"Why do you ask me?" I shoveled rice in my mouth so I wouldn't have to elaborate.

"Um. This is a planning meeting and you volunteered and said you had a plan."

"That's why you can't trust politicians," I said and laughed at my own incoherent joke. I felt like crawling under the coffee table. The dog in me was whining and tucking its tail between its legs.

"Okay." James looked like he was trying to see through my skull to determine if there was any spare change rattling around up there. "I'm used to you acting weird, but you're acting really weird."

"Sorry. I know."

"I know how it must be for you. Him and your brother being so close and all."

"It's not-I don't think-I don't want to think. It shouldn't be that hard." I looked down at my food. "I won't have a problem with it." I raked my fork through my rice.

"Oh. Kay. Well. I'm glad we cleared that up."

For a minute, neither of us said anything. I kept staring at my curry.

Then James slammed his plastic fork down on the coffee table. "Dammit, Sirius. What aren't you telling me?"

"It's not-I'm not." I got hot. "I'm sorry. I'm just. Not myself, lately. Sorry."

"Yeah, you're not kidding about that. Ever since—" I was unable to make eye contact with him, but staring past the side of his face, I could see he was bright red. "Fine, I'm just going to say it, ever since your damn brother came back you've been different. And whatever I try to do about it." He threw his arms out, palms up. "It just doesn't seem to matter."

I took a deep breath. "How many times do I have to tell you-"

"Don't tell me to leave him out of it. Don't fucking tell me. I won't."

"What did he do to you that's so fucking horrible? Try to stop Voldemort? You didn't even hate him so much when he was a fucking Death Eater."

"He used you, Sirius, he guilted you into helping him, implicating you-and me, yeah-and in the end, he took everything from you-"

"It's a war, James. Fuck. You'd think it was you got disfigured. I don't regret what I did. Sorry I'm not exactly the same as when I was 16."

"I don't care about that, I just. I know you, and this isn't you. I do regret. You're going to freak out, but I regret that I didn't turn him in the first time he came to your flat. I regret that I didn't do something about it then."

I put my head down on the table.

"It's not like I want to say that, or to think that. But the only difference, if I had done that and that I didn't-if I'd done it, you wouldn't have had this shit happen to you. He'd still be in prison, either way."

"You know, there are worse things that can happen to a person that what happened to me." My voice was muffled through my arms.

James didn't say anything.

After a minute, I lifted up my head and finished my curry.

"Well, I reckon we ought get started," James said, mouth full of samosa.

"Yeah. I know where the Rosiers' house is. I can write it down for you."

"It's unplottable."

"Yeah, like basically all pureblood homes. Except your parents'." I looked at him and smirked.

"Okay. So what do we do after that? I mean, when we're there."

"Well, we'll have to figure that out once we're there. That's the point of a stakeout, right? Is that you have to wait for the mark to do something suspicious. It's all waiting."

"Aw fuck, and here I was thinking we're going to get to _do_ something."

I punched him in the arm. "Well, let's hope we catch him like, sacrificing a virgin to Lord Voldemort through his sitting room window. So we can do something, you know."

He punched me back. "Well, when're we going?"

I scratched my chin. "What about this weekend?"

"He might not be home weekends, don't you think?"

"Oh, I don't know." If James thought Rosier had a busy social calendar, well, I disagreed. I didn't even understand his friendship with my brother. It couldn't have been anything like my friendship with James. I looked at him. He was poking around in his curry with his fork, fishing out bits of spinach. I didn't think Rosier was capable of having a real friendship, being a sociopath and all. And for that matter, I couldn't really imagine my brother forming a stable and lasting relationship with another human being. And yet, here I was, lying to and yelling at James, while Rosier was putting all his energy into doing the impossible for my brother.

It took me great effort to swallow the bite I had in my mouth.

The next day, I met Rosier again.

"I went to see him yesterday," he said. He smoothed the newspaper down in front of him and tickled one of the immobile photographs under the chin.

"What are you doing reading a Muggle newspaper?" I asked. I dropped my bag down by the table and sat down across from him.

"I find it entertaining to know what insects buzz about." I made a gagging noise. "Don't you want to know how Regulus is?"

"No. I mean, well. No. Did you talk to your guard friend?"

The waiter came up and took our orders. This place was marginally nicer than the last. Lit brighter, anyway.

"Yes, yes, I did, in fact."

"And?"

"And what?"

"You didn't invite him to a Quidditch match, yet?"

"I invited him for a drink."

"Does he know who you are?"

"I don't know; he knows my name. I don't flatter myself to think I'm that famous."

"Well, where are you going?"

"I'm to meet him at his house."

I felt my hands shiver. "What are you planning on doing to him?"

"Don't be so cynical. I'm just going to have a drink with the man."

"When?"

"Tomorrow night."

"I want to come."

He laughed. "No. You said it yourself, you can't be seen with me."

"By someone who doesn't even know me-"

"You're being remarkably dense, you know? This is a man who works at the prison where your brother is an inmate. You think, simple as he is, he won't know who you are? When he's probably even seen you there? And yes, it matters, Sirius. He's dumb as a brick, but even he'll remember if he sees the two of us together. And a time will come that someone knowing something like that will hurt us. Yes, a time will come."

"Okay, well, fine, you sound like the Grim Reaper right now, but fine. I'm going to follow you."

"No, you're not."

"At a discreet distance."

The waiter brought Evan his tea and toast and me my beer and sandwich.

"Thank you." Evan showed his rows of teeth to the waiter. "And no, you can't follow me. From any kind of distance."

"How do you plan to stop me?"

"I might not be able to stop you, but I'd know."

"And what would you do about it?"

Evan squeezed lemon into his tea and blew over the top. He dripped all over his newspaper. "We're going to have to trust one another sooner or later." He took a sip and wiped the corner of his mouth with a napkin. "Or rather, you're going to have to trust me. I already trust you. In fact, I trust you so much, I'm just going to let this subject drop."

"Where does he live?"

Evan smeared jam on his toast and sucked on his lip. "Why do you want to know?"

"If you trust me so damn much, just tell me where he lives."

"Fine." He took a bite off the corner of his toast and snapped his fingers with his free hand.

I picked up my sandwich and he set the card down in front of me, face down.

* * *

That afternoon, I went down to Dagenham. The house was one among many in a set up two-up, two-downs. Brick, with peeling white trim and overgrown window boxes. It was hard to loiter in the neighborhood. There weren't benches on the pavement, and there were plenty of people out on their stoops or leaning in their windows who might have seen me.

Whatever his name was, Benedict Something, kept his curtains drawn, and his house was in the middle of the block, so there wasn't a way in, except by the front.

I didn't reckon he was home, anyway.

I wasn't sure what I could glean from this visit, anyway. I didn't need to know anything about this guy. I just wanted to make sure Evan didn't try to kidnap or torture him. I shoved my hands in my pockets and kept walking down the pavement. The only way to do that was to be here, tomorrow night.

Tomorrow night, when I was supposed to be staking out Rosier's house with James. Not that there'd be any point being there then.

I sucked on my lip and felt in my pockets for the dose of painkillers I'd siphoned off.

I got through the ensuing conversation with James largely through being high out of my mind.

"I can't do it tomorrow," I said.

"Can't do what?"

"Go to Rosier's house." I shifted from foot to foot on James's stoop.

He was in his pajamas, squinting at me. "Why?"

My heart rattled around my rib cage. "I have a date."

James mouth contorted like he'd forgot how to make a facial expression.

"I'm sorry."

"No, it's just." He shook his head and blinked a lot. "You should go, I just-well, why don't we do it Saturday night?"

My throat closed in on itself, and I thought my head might roll off onto the floor. "Yeah, Saturday's great."

"Don't get any plans in the meantime."

It didn't occur to me until later that he might have been joking.

* * *

I didn't know how clever Rosier was, really. I wasn't inclined in underestimate him.

I took almost left my wand at home, to eliminate any chance of being traced magically. In the end, I took a circuitous route through side streets and blocks of flats, pausing in a basement toilet to put on a disguise made entirely of non-magical materials behind a stack of milk crates. From that basement, I walked to Dagenham, which took upwards of two hours.

Still, I was early at Benedict Whatsit's. It was still daylight when I got there, which was a disadvantage in many ways. People could see me. There weren't easy places to hide. There wasn't anything in the neighborhood to do, and there wasn't anywhere convenient from where I could watch the house. I had to be early, I mean. Those disadvantages didn't matter, in comparison to how much it mattered being early. If I'd had James's invisibility cloak, the process would've been easier. I couldn't think about James, though. I forgot what I was doing when I thought about him.

When I turned the corner on Benedict W's street, my face was itching. I'd kept the thin layer of bandages I wore now-I'd got good at putting them on by myself-and tried to cover up my face with as much fake hair as possible, and sunglasses to mask my eye. Predictably, the fake hair poked through the gauze and irritated the new skin underneath. I had to hold my hands together to keep from pulling at the hair. I had to keep reminding myself. It wasn't magic, it would fall off. If I weren't careful, it would look absurd and fake. It might already look absurd and fake. The mirror in the toilet had been greasy, so I wasn't sure.

I walked on the pavement on the side of the street opposite from where Benedict W lived. There were gardens with sparse bushes. I tried to imagine hiding myself in one. I don't think any one of them could conceal my body in any position. The only feasible solution I could think of was to break into an empty house and watch from inside. But I wasn't stupid, there were problems with that. I doubted anyone in this neighborhood had a security system or neighbors eager to call the police. Still, it did have neighbors with not much to do.

I walked down the block. Benedict W's house looked just the same as when I had been there last. That is, with all the curtains drawn, it was hard to tell whether anyone was home. I didn't see the glow of lights behind ay of the hangings. It didn't make any sense for anyone to be home, anyway.

If I were to guess, knowing Evan, I would say his screening process for potential victims would weed out those with a functional support system. He probably didn't want to kidnap someone with a lot of friends. And he'd already said Benedict W lived alone. And the guy sounded pretty dopey. Impressed by Evan's poshness, probably. Ready to invite a basic stranger into his house. A stranger he'd met at his job as a prison guard. A stranger who'd been visiting a convicted murderer member of a terrorist organization. Maybe this man thought that was cool, though. Maybe he'd be a Death Eater, too, if he had the guts or the pedigree.

I walked up to the front door and rang the buzzer. Standing on the stoop, I kept twisting my fake beard. A minute passed, and I was trying to decide whether to walk away or whether there was a way I could attempt to break in without appearing to break in to people watching from the street.

The door opened a crack while I was thinking. Evan's smile glinted through the darkness, and he opened the door the rest of the way. "How did I know?"

I forced my curse back down my throat. "I ought to ask you the same question." I stepped past him over the threshold and scanned the interior. Everything was a pale salmon color or white. I was surprised by how neat and feminine the space seemed. Everything matched. I looked back at Evan. He was locking the door behind me.

"This isn't his house," I said.

"No." He walked by, into the sitting room.

I followed him. "After all that about trust."

He went into a cabinet opposite the stairwell and took out a bottle of scotch. "Would you like ice in yours?"

"No."

He poured two glasses and handed one to me. I sat down on the armchair by the fake fireplace, and he took the sofa.

"The trust thing was a ruse, I'll give you that. I suppose it's safe to say we don't trust one another."

I made a noise in my throat.

"It's different, the way we don't trust another. Between the two of us, I mean." He crossed his legs and tightened his brows. "It's not that I don't trust you to, say, do the right or proper thing. It's that I don't trust you to trust me. Or, I suppose, not to make stupid mistakes every once in a while." His eyes moved so fast I let him make contact with mine before I could stop it.

I reckoned he had a point. "Well, that is a problem. If we're going to work together toward any goal. Whose house is this, anyway?"

"An older woman who died. As far as the neighbors know, I'm her great-nephew, and I'm handling the estate."

"Did you-"

"No, I did not kill her. If that's what you're asking. I'm not actually a serial killer." He laughed. "Can you take off that ridiculous disguise, please?"

I stopped twisting my false beard in my fingers. "Oh." I pulled the beard off, found my wand in my pocket, and Vanished the makeup.

"I appreciate the effort to use Muggle means, but you should work on the execution."

"What do you know about Muggle disguises? Never mind."

"How do I get you to trust me?"

Evan had a habitual posture I was picking up on. He used it when he was trying to look sincere and serious. He sat with his elbows on his knees and knees over his ankles. He brought his hands together between his knees and held his glass between his hands. He ran his thumbs up and down the glass. He hunched his shoulders over and looked me in the eye, his neck forward.

"You could start by telling me the truth. At least once in a while."

"When have a lied to you? Other than about where my friend Benedict lives. Which, you must admit, I was clearly right to do." He wasn't smiling now, or blinking that I could tell. If he thought that inspired confidence, he was mistaken.

I tried to think.

"The answer is I haven't." Evan swirled his tumbler under his nose and took a long, slow sip. When he finished, he wiped his mouth and looked back at me. "Please, think about it as long as you want. I wouldn't lie to you, Sirius. Unless you were about to do something foolish, like now."

"Well, it's your definition of 'foolish' I don't trust." I looked down at my drink. I didn't like looking him in the eyes. "I came here because I was worried what you were going to do to this guy. We're not going to get anything done unless we agree on what we are and aren't going to do."

"Yes. But if I agree to do things the way you want to do them, we won't get anything done at all."

I sucked in on my lips.

"Sirius, we'll have to ruffle a few feathers. I'm not going to hurt anyone I don't have to. And besides, once I memory charm them, they won't even remember they got hurt in the first place."

I thought that was supposed to be a joke, but I wasn't sure. "You know Aurors can tell when someone's had a memory charm put on them."

"Yes, but Aurors won't be involved until it's too late." He did grin now, mischievously. His eyes even widened and looked like he was about to burst out laughing.

"What happened to the woman who lived here?" I swept my arm across the room. The scotch sloshed in my glass.

"You don't honestly think." Evan held out his palms, as if to suggest just how innocent he was. "I mean, that I got rid of an elderly woman just to have a fake address to give you?"

"I didn't say anything like that, but now that you mention it."

"I didn't." He rolled his eyes. "No, Mrs. Behrens had cancer. Unfortunately, she succumbed to it about a week ago. Do you smoke?" He pulled a packet of cigarettes out of his pocket.

I stuck out my fingers, and Evan flicked a cigarette between them.

"How did you know about it?" I asked. I hadn't smoked in a while. The nicotine went to my head. "About this old lady?"

"I was doing research. I found Mrs. Behrens at the hospital. Well, hospice."

"You were volunteering."

"No, I was posing as her only family." He blew smoke straight up out of his mouth, and it seemed to get caught in his curls. He shrugged. "She didn't know, at that point, anyone who was around her. I knew we were going to need somewhere like this. Coffee shops were getting inconvenient."

"Why didn't you just find a place for rent?" I laughed. Honestly, it gave me the creeps up my back that he'd put so much effort into this.

Evan laughed, too. "Don't be dumb. I wasn't about to deal with landlords and paperwork."

"You're a goddamn wizard."

"It's inconvenient. This is easy. She didn't have any living family. The neighborhood is happy to see someone like me come in, happy to accept she had someone after all, so she's not their responsibility. The hospice, too."

"I think you just did it that way cos you'd have more fun." I took a long drag of my cigarette and a drink of my scotch. "In some morbid way."

"I'm allowed to have fun, sometimes."

"Seems complicated to me."

"Well, like you said, I'm a wizard." Evan shrugged. "A good one, too."

"Oh, right. The Os."

"Look, things will be easier this way. We can put up maps and pin things to walls. Like detectives."

"Sounds just great."

"No one we know will ever come out here."

"If you're as sneaky as you think you are."

"Oh, I am. It's you I'm worried about. With that disguise." He giggled.

"What about this Benedict guy, then?"

"Benedict Sherman. I'm still meeting him this evening. I was hoping I'd convince you not to try to follow me."

"You're going to have to convince me you're not going to kill, torture, or kidnap him, first. And that you really didn't kill the lady who lived here. Did she die here, by the way?"

"No. She died at he hospice." Evan snubbed his cigarette out on the coffee table. There wasn't an ashtray. "You can ask them if you want to be that morbid. St. Anselm's Hospice. Mrs. Alma Behrens. You can even ask them about me. Now, let's move on-"

"No. Are you or aren't you going to kill, torture, or kidnap Benedict Whatsisface?"

"No."

"Are you lying?"

"Look, what is your definition of 'torture'? And 'kidnap'?"

"Do you have a conscience? Any kind of moral compass? Torture. Inflict pain on someone in order to extract information, or well, for any reason at all. Kidnap. Restrain in any one place against his will, or drugs him and take him somewhere he doesn't want to go-well, on or not on drugs, even-and keep him there, or look, you know what the hell these words mean. I don't want to give you any loopholes here."

"So I should just smile at him and hope that does the trick, then?"

"Well, is he gay?"

"What does that mean?"

"You could sleep with him and see if he'll tell you anything?"

"That is disgusting."

"So, you're fine with breaking someone's kneecaps but having sex is somehow wrong and digesting?"

"Yes. Actually. That's it exactly." He sloshed his scotch from side to side in his glass.

I laughed, and tipped my drink down my throat. When the burn subsided in my stomach, I forced the smile off my face.

Evan had lit another cigarette. He blew smoke from his nose and his eyelids fluttered.

"Why do you care so much about this?" I asked. "I don't get it."

"What's not to understand? You're here, too." He crossed his legs in the opposite direction.

"I'm his brother. And it wasn't even my idea. I'm still not totally convinced. Largely because I don't understand your motivation. You're doing this without Voldemort's knowledge. Against his will. He'll kill the both of you."

A muscle in his jaw twitched. "I wish you'd stop making these unfounded accusations."

"See? This is why I can't trust you. My brother was a Death Eater. I still helped him. And I already know that you're one. I'm still here. Just admit it."

Evan clenched his cigarette tight in his puckered lips and the flame shot down the shaft. "Okay. You asked why I care about this. I'll tell you." He pushed the cigarette away, ashed on the carpet, cracked his neck, and smiled. "Have you ever seen your brother smile? I wouldn't be surprised if you hadn't. He doesn't do it very often. But I love it when he does, when you can see his teeth. His canines stick out at odd angles. But I like it when he scowls, too. He used to take himself very seriously, and I liked that. Now, I suppose he's having some kind of identity crisis." He looked down and scratched at his knee with his thumbnail. "I don't understand it, that much I'll admit to. It's unlike anything he's ever been before, in all the time I've known him. Even now, in Azkaban, he's different, and not because of where he is, but because of who he is, now, I suppose. I could feel it, too, beforehand. For months beforehand, it was like I could feel him moving away. At first I didn't like that. I thought it changed who he was. At first it was hard. But now that I've got used to it, I like that too. I suppose what he does doesn't really matter to me. I like him, and I find everything else in life boring at best." He looked at me and shrugged his shoulders. His whole body sagged. "So what else am I supposed to do now?"

I stared at him. "We're in the middle of a war, and you're bored?"

"Yes." He got up and refilled his scotch. "I'm bored, and this is entertaining and challenging."

"So, what happens when it's not fun anymore? When this starts to bore you? It's not a damn game."

"Well, it is. More or less. It's a game I intend very much to win. I'm not going to lose interest halfway through, if that's what you're worried about."

"Oh, I'm worried about a lot of things." I scratched at some of the sticky makeup I hadn't quite got off my chin.

"I would do anything for him. I would go on, but I don't know if you want me to."

"You're right, I don't." I pushed on my stomach, which had begun to feel a bit weird.

"So, are you going to let me handle the situation, or not?"

I forced down a mouthful of scotch to settle my stomach. "Just. Don't make anyone suspicious, okay?" I rubbed at my eye.

"Don't do that. You only have one eye, do you want to get it infected? I'll be careful. Trust me."

* * *

_A/n: Sorry for the long delay. I have a lot of original fiction going atm, too, sooo that kind of takes precedence. Although honestly this is more fun, half the time. But I get to be like, really, really weird in some of my original fiction, so that is the funnest. I kind of hat parts of this. :( Not the process, which is always great, but the um... stagnation, I guess. I just go off writing big long conversation scenes and surprise nothing ever actually happens oops._


	10. Chapter 10

The next night, James and I set up shop outside Evan's house underneath James's invisibility cloak. We could both just barely fit under it when we were crouched down in the bushes. Climbing in, we made a lot of noise, between the crunching brambles and our strangled cursing. James said if anyone heard, they'd just think it was a stray cat. I said next time, we were getting a van to sit in.

I was still nervous Evan would know we were there. It was like he had some kind of creepy intuition. I reckon it had something to do with the Dark Arts.

James pulled out his binoculars and stuck them up to his eyes. I look at the Rosiers'. The windows were dark. Even the front light was out.

"See anything?" I asked.

James's mouth twisted into a grimace under the binoculars. "The curtains are drawn."

"How long are we going to be here, again?"

"This was your idea. How did your date go last night?"

I was glad he couldn't see my face. "Fine."

"Are you going to see her again?"

"No. I mean. It didn't go that well. She was boring."

"That's too bad."

"We should stop talking."

"No one is here to hear us."

"Someone might come."

"What is even the point of having two people out here, then? If we can't even talk?"

"Shut up, okay?" I pulled the binoculars out of James's hands. They were attached to his neck, and he choked while I forced them up to my eye. There wasn't anything to see, and I dropped them again.

James clutched at his neck like there was a string of pearls there.

I laughed. "I kind of figured we'd be better at this."

Once James finished choking melodramatically, he said, "Well, patience has never been one our principal virtues." He put the binoculars back up to his eyes, and the lenses clacked against his glasses.

I thought about that and looked at the Rosiers' house. In the dark, I couldn't see much more than a blur of floating abstract shapes. You never miss your sense of depth until it's gone. "You know, that's not true. We were patient about a lot of things. The map. Becoming Animagi. We spent years doing that stuff."

"Yeah." James fiddled with a dial on the binoculars and shifted them over. He was probably looking at the lit house next door. "But that stuff was fun."

I didn't have anything to say to that. Sometimes, it hadn't been fun. Sometimes it had been frustrating and had seemed impossible. But I reckoned even that part had been fun for James. He could do anything. I wished I could tell him-well, it's just that he would've had some ideas, you know? And energy and optimism. Well, maybe not about that. I don't know.

"Oh, this girl is getting undressed," he said. "Sexy knickers."

I had my fingers in my mouth, only I hadn't realized it. I spit out a hangnail and strained to make a sharper image of the Rosiers' house.

James put his binoculars down. "Oh, come on."

"I know you're making it up," I said. I peeled another hangnail into the quick. I felt it bite into my flesh and the sudden coldness of a spot of blood rising to the surface. "You don't even want to look at anyone but Lily."

"Even if she's the size of half a house now." Sometimes he tried to be crass like that about her, but I heard the goopy tenderness in his voice. There wasn't ever any doubt in my mind how beautiful he thought she was. How much he loved her under any conditions. Unconditional love, that was what he felt.

I gnawed my cuticles back, one finger at a time. "Do you see anything, actually? Down the street or anything?"

"No." James's voice peaked. As if I should question his investigative abilities.

"Sorry."

"Well." James put the binoculars down and settled further into the bushes. "Sooner or later, he's either got to come home or leave. Even if he lives the rest of his life in complete darkness."

"Him or one of those sisters. Or his mother."

"Yeah. You'd think at least someone would be home and moving around. Unless they're all at a Death Eater symposium or something."

"Yeah, his eight sisters and seventy-year-old mother."

"You know they say there used to be a ninth sister, but she was a squib."

I snorted. "I reckon a girl like that wouldn't last long with Michel Rosier as a father."

"What do you mean?"

"I mean he would've put her in a sack and taken her down to the river, yeah?"

"You think he would've killed his own daughter? Really? I just reckoned it was a rumor."

I thought about the look on Evan's face when he told me his father was dead. "Yes. I think he would have."

James made a gagging sound.

"I don't know it's true. It's probably not. But he would have."

"It's probably not," James said.

I wanted to tell him, you have to believe. Every time I opened my mouth, I almost told him everything. That tone in his voice, that he just couldn't imagine anyone would want to kill their own child, that anyone could be so wicked made me want to hug him tight. Made me wonder, how it was I didn't doubt that someone could do that at all. Made me think about all the times I'd imagined a family member dead, and how it made me feel, something like the expression on the grieving Evan Rosier's face.

* * *

James and I stayed out there all night without anything happening in or outside the Rosiers' house. No one even turned on a light to use the toilet. James fell asleep towards dawn, but not me. I hadn't brought any extra doses of medication, so by dawn I was ready to die, but I couldn't sleep.

I woke him up.

"It's not a waste of time," he said, with no follow-up to that. We tried to discreetly awaken our legs, which had fallen asleep in the bushes. While I was shaking out my left foot in the brambles, trying to pretend the noise was coming from a squirrel or something foraging in the bushes, I looked up and noticed someone out of my peripheral vision walking down the pavement. I stopped shaking my leg and clamped a hand down over James's mouth, even though he wasn't talking.

I hissed at him preemptively and turned his jaw in my hand to point the way I was facing. My long-distance vision was bad now. I probably wouldn't ever be able to play Quidditch again, but I could see his rusty curls, and that something about his gait, how he didn't seem to have any vertical motion associated with his steps, nothing jerking or uneven, nothing to indicate he was even touching the ground.

"That's Rosier," I whispered.

"Yeah." James's voice came out garbled, past my fingers inadvertently pushing his lower lip into a bunch.

"What's he doing come home at 6:00 am?"

"Ida nuh." James shook his head and I took my hand away.

"Where's he been?" I couldn't tell him what I was thinking.

"Either killing Muggle-borns or out drinking," he said. "It's tough to tell." I wanted to clamp my hand over his mouth again. "Maybe both at once."

I slapped him with the back of my fingers on the side of his face. It barely looked like Evan was moving, but suddenly he was on his doorstep, and then he was disappearing into his house. The door shut behind him, and the house stayed dark.

"Why is it so dark in there? He didn't turn any lights on. People are in there. Why are they just in the dark all the time?" I put my fingers to my lips.

I wasn't really talking to James, but he answered. "They are-most of them, anyway-wizards, you know. It might just look dark on the outside."

"Why, though?"

James guffawed. "Really? Your family's house isn't even visible from the street, and you can't figure out why they don't want people to know they're home?"

I kept staring at the house. "That's different. It doesn't look weird, a house you don't know exists not being there. It looks weird, their house being dark all the time. It draws attention to them. Just look at the other houses around them."

We did. The house to the left of the Rosiers' had all of its lights on, save for one upper-floor dormer. The one to its right had just the upper-floor lit up-they must have been just waking up and had yet to go downstairs.

"This whole neighborhood is up way too early on a Sunday morning," I said.

James kept fiddling with some dial on the binoculars, and I began to suspect he was not trying to improve his view of the house at all. Maybe they just reckon they're less likely to be bothered if they keep their lights off. Or maybe they're denizens of the underworld who thrive in the darkness." He grinned stupidly at his own joke, and I resisted the urge to elbow him in the soft parts and pretend it was an accident. He put the binoculars down. "What do we hope to learn from this venture now? Are we going to wait for him to come back out?"

No was the clear answer, but I didn't say that outright to James. His smugness was irritating. I almost wished he would just go home. I'd sit here by myself. But I didn't think he'd take that suggestion well, either.

It was maddening that I couldn't seem to find the difference between Evan going out on a Saturday night doing normal things normally like a normal person, and Evan going out suspiciously on a Saturday night, doing suspicious and undoubtedly creepy things and returning to his house suspiciously at 6:00 in the morning.

My face began to feel like it was melting putty. I needed to get back to my flat and my painkillers.

"Nothing," I said. "I don't reckon we hope to gain anything. Let's go."

* * *

I got back home, took my potion, fell asleep, and didn't wake up until after the sun had already set.

I was supposed to go to the doctor Monday morning. I was hoping she'd tell me we could do the reconstruction soon. On my nose. I was wearing fewer and fewer bandages lately, and not only because it was hard for me to do them myself. James told me I looked almost normal, like a normal person who didn't really have a nose. After that, he snorted and laughed weirdly and his face ended up in an expression like he was in some considerable pain. He had stiffened and looked away.

When I woke up Sunday night, I pushed all the empty take-away boxes off my coffee table and pulled the telephone in front of me. The flat smelled like something rotten and wet. I dialed up my favorite Indian restaurant and cleared a spot on the carpet pushing boxes with my feet.

I was still explaining to the guy on the other end how I wanted my curry done-he was saying, "Yeah, I got it," cos he thought he knew my order, but they always got it wrong, and I was trying to get across how they always got it wrong, you know, Lily always told me I shouldn't give out my address to strangers on the phone, but I mean, this guy worked at the restaurant around the corner and he had for like, over a year, never mind that he never got my curry right in all that time, and not like Lily was one to talk, before she got pregnant we used to get stoned and order pizza all the time, and I knew she was just using her inability to have any fun as an excuse to have fun by stopping everyone else from having any. I mean, that wasn't really fair, to her. But, just like father-to-be James was different from regular James, mother-to-be Lily was different, too. The point I was making, what I was talking about beforehand, was that I was still on the phone with this guy when I noticed the inoperable fireplace on my wall glittering like it was about to catch fire.

"I'll call you back," I said and hung up. I stood up and the take-away boxes popped and snapped under my feet.

The fireplace kept glittering and crackling on no fuel. There weren't even plaster logs in there. Sometimes I kept my dirty laundry there. The thing hadn't worked for years. Decades. I peered at it, squinting. The brief flashes grew more frequent, and closer together until they were just one shifting disc of light. The disc turned, and Lily's face appeared in it.

"Oh, hi, Sirius. For a second, I thought I had the wrong number." She laughed, then seemed to choke, and sparks flew out of her mouth.

"What are you-"

"Can I come over?"

"Er. Okay."

"It's just pretty weird with my head in the fireplace over here. I didn't even know this would work, cos you know, your fireplace isn't real and all."

"It's real, it just. It doesn't work is the thing."

"Well, okay."

"I didn't even know it was on the Floo network."

"Me neither." She smiled and her flaming lips looked like they were consuming her face.

"Are you hungry? I was just on the phone with the Indian place. I'll call them back."

"Yeah."

"Aren't you going to say I shouldn't be giving out my address?"

"Well, right now I'm hungry." Lily's face shifted in the fire, and her whole head emerged, her long hair tumbling locks of fire onto the hearth. Her neck jerked to each side, and I braced in anticipation of her head rolling out into my living room. Instead, her shoulders popped out of the fire, and her hair, already outside the fireplace, cooled and the flames receded from it. "Help me." She rolled her shoulder up and thrust her arm out of the fire, throwing a stream of sparks at me. I stamped them out as they dropped on the carpet, and the fire retreated down her arm, leaving it pale white and looking very cold. I grabbed her hand and leaned back. The rest of her body rose and fell out of the fire and onto the carpet. Once I got my balance, I helped her to her feet.

"Thanks." She scrubbed at her face with her hands, like part of her might still be on fire.

"Does James know you're here?"

The smile morphed seamlessly into a pout. "Can't I just come visit you by myself?"

"Don't make that face at me; it's weird."

"Weird how."

"Weird like strangely sex kittenish."

"Oh my god, gross. No, it isn't. That's the face I use on my dad when I want something from him."

"Holy shit."

"Stop. Don't." She put her hand over her mouth, and I almost started to steer her to the toilet. "Please don't say anything else before you ruin my childhood."

"Sorry."

"I don't believe you, anyway." We sat down on the sofa, and I picked up the phone and started dialing. "I am a manatee. No one can look like a sex kitten and be a manatee at the same time."

"You know sailors used to mistake manatees for mermaids, so. Hey, I just called? Right, sorry, I got busy, and instead of one curry, it's going to be two, and do you remember what I saying a minute ago? Okay, well, look, Melvin, at this point we know each other pretty well, and you can just-okay, whatever, yeah, 30 minutes is fine. Okay, sounds good, bye." I hung up. "I think he's going to spit in our curry."

Lily laughed. "If you're having conversations as long as that with the guy at the Indian carry-out place, I think it's a sign you need to get out more."

"I am getting out more. For instance, I'm going to the Healer tomorrow."

"You don't even remember her name, do you? Speaking of girls whose names you probably don't remember, how was your date the other night?"

I looked away from her and studied my fingernails intently. "Oh, it was fine."

"Are you going out with her again?"

"Er. No, I don't think so."

Lily laughed. "Of course, I knew it." She leaned back into the couch cushions and rubbed her belly. It wasn't really so big. She didn't look like a manatee. She wasn't even due until July or August, and it wasn't even April yet.

When she saw I wasn't laughing, she sighed and put her hand on my shoulder. "Oh, Sirius. Let me set you up with one of my friends."

"I know all of your friends."

"Don't you like any of them? How about Mary?"

"How did I know you were going to say Mary?"

"What's wrong with Mary?"

"Nothing. No, I mean, I like Mary. Really. We went to that Quidditch match and all, I mean, you were there."

"So you don't want to date her?"

I laughed. "Do I have to? Is this really what we're talking about?"

"Well, what do you want to talk about?"

"Nothing. I mean. Not nothing, I want to talk to you. But, I just don't think it matters, I mean, I'm probably not going to date anyone soon. Any time soon." I pushed against the back of my teeth with my tongue.

"Oh, okay. That's fine. Is it just that-okay, I'll just say it, is it because you're worried about your face?"

"Christ, Lily."

"No, I just meant that, well, I was going to say anyway. Your face looks really good. As a trainee Healer. It's just looking a lot better recently. And if I were your Healer, I would say to go ahead with the reconstruction. And the eye, too."

"Okay, yeah. I know."

"I'm just trying to. Yeah. Okay." She looked down at her knees.

"Yeah, I know. You know at the Order meeting?"

"Yeah."

"I can't tell if Emmeline Vance is trying to out me as a spy for Voldemort or if she likes me." I laughed. "I can't even tell the difference."

Lily laughed, too, but her mouth was slack, her eyes distant.

I looked over my shoulder and hoped the intercom would buzz soon.

"I'm sorry I didn't listen to you more about, when you were saying you were worried Dumbledore wasn't clarifying for people what had happened. You were right. It is important."

"I just don't know how I'm supposed to work with people who don't trust me. And if they don't trust me, how can I trust them? Emmeline said she was going to talk to Dumbledore, but that's the last I heard about it." Something about this conversation was making my face hot.

"I'll talk to him. I'll talk to Dumbledore," she said.

"Lily, don't."

"Why not? Someone has to do something about it-"

"I'm asking you not to." I looked around at the door, still hoping for that buzzer.

"But I don't know why if Emmeline-"

"Well, I don't know it's a good idea for her to, either. But she's not here for me to tell her so."

"I just want to help." Her face was pink.

"You help me enough already."

She looked like she was about to say something sappy. About friendship and an unselfish heart or, you know. I got up from the sofa and leaned on the kitchen counter.

The buzzer rang. It was the deliveryman. I waited just outside the front door while he climbed up the three flights of stairs. The lift still wasn't working, and I didn't think it ever would. I crossed my arms over my stomach and stared at the door at the top of the stairs.

I remembered that, just a few months ago, when I'd stood outside waiting for Regulus to climb those stairs. When he'd come through that door like something dead washed up on the shore. He even smelled like the gross dark bottom of the ocean. The purple circles under his eyes.

I touched my own face, the left side, and felt the grooves of the scars across my cheekbone.

I was lying to Lily and James and working with someone who stood for everything most repulsive to me in the world. Someone I thought belonged in Azkaban if not somewhere worse. If not at the bottom of the ocean. But it would be worth it. I was just worried, what if, when this was all over, they didn't understand?

I leaned against the door. When this was over. I pressed my palm against my face, and the grooves of my scars, my still-healing wounds felt like my thumbprint magnified, blown up a hundred times.

I wasn't thinking about any life I could have after, if there was an after. If I got my brother out, then, that was the end. What would we do? If there was a we, a me and him, there couldn't be a me and James. I think that was clear. He had a family, now.

My brother wanted me to visit our parents.

The deliveryman opened the door.


	11. Chapter 11

Lily and I ate dinner that night and she went home, without either of us thinking of much more to say. She hugged me when she left.

The next morning, I woke up twenty minutes before my appointment at the Healer.

She said, like Lily did, that everything looked good. She held a penlight in my face and squinted into my scars.

"Well," she said. She turned off the penlight and tucked it back in her pocket. "The scars are cursed, as we knew. They're never going to properly heal or fade. But they'll get better. I know it doesn't seem worth it now, but keep putting the ointment on. It helps."

I nodded.

"You must want to know about the nasal reconstruction. And the ocular prosthesis. I want to schedule the procedure for as soon as possible. For the nose. The eye is less complicated, but we'll still have to do a fitting, and it will have to be painted to match your other eye."

"Can we paint it red instead? Or tiger-striped, maybe? How about glow-in-the-dark?" I laughed.

She didn't. She waited for me to quiet down before she continued. "The only contingency is the tissue around your eye, whether it's still too sensitive to have the fitting done, or to have the prosthesis in permanently."

"Oh, I don't think so. Yeah, I think it's fine." I poked at my temple with my finger.

"Well, in that case, the first thing we want to do is start weaning you off those painkillers."

"Er. What?"

"They can be dangerous when taken for too long, and if you're feeling better, it's best to go ahead and stop."

"But they're the only reason I feel better. I mean, I feel awful when I don't take them."

"In that case, we may need to reconsider that you're ready to start the reconstruction process."

I felt my lips puckering. It was a touch decision, whether I wanted my nose and eye or the drugs more. Tougher than it sounds.

"Of course, you'll need to continue taking them in lower doses for a short time after your nasal reconstruction. You should expect to be bedridden for a few days afterwards. Do you have somewhere to stay?"

"Er. Yes."

"I mean someone to take care of you while you're in bed," she said. She straightened her glasses.

"Yeah, I get it."

"So, I want to schedule you as soon as we can fit you in. Talk to the girl at the front desk and she'll work something out."

The front desk girl was extremely pretty, with long, straight black hair. I did not want to have to talk to her. I kept my eye on my shoe, but I could hear the fake smile in her voice.

I met James at a restaurant that night.

"So, to recap, last time we learned-" He scratched behind his ear with a pen. "What did we learn, Sirius?"

I buried my head in my arms. "Nothing."

"Okay, I thought so, I just wanted to confirm that with you. You know, just verify the information that I had. And get your head off the table, that's bad manners."

I propped my chin up on the edge of the table. "I'm getting a nose on Monday," I said. I smiled with all of my teeth.

"Congratulations. It'll be nice to talk to you without feeling like I'm having a conversation with a Halloween prop."

"Wow, harsh."

"Sorry. I'm happy for you. Just. Do you think sympathy hormones are a real thing?"

"Why, feeling thick around the middle?"

"Ha ha. I feel near death."

"Don't try to blame your moodiness on Lily."

"Okay, but if already we're up all night arguing about the kid's name, what's it going to be like when he's actually, you know, a real baby?" He grabbed a clump of hair on either side of his head.

"What were the options?" My teeth clacked together. "Naming options."

"Well, she likes all this weird stuff. Like Chester. She likes Chester a lot."

"That sounds like a dog's name. What would you even call him? What did you have?"

"I like Mordecai."

"Oh, no, that's way worse. That's so weird."

"Oh, cos Sirius is a totally normal name."

"First of all, Sirius is a family name based on the Ancient Greek, and second, yes, it sucks, and I would never name my child that. When I meet Muggles, I tell them my name is Sam."

"Sometimes I feel out of place being a pureblood named James, you know? Like Remus is only a halfie and his name's Remus."

"You know, what the fuck are the chances they name him Remus and he gets bit by a werewolf, right?"

"Remus Fucking Lupin."

"It's like a fucking bad joke."

"We shouldn't mention that to him, though."

"No, definitely not."

"What about Leonard? For the baby."

"No. Sounds fat. I don't know. What about Castor?"

"Isn't that another of your family names?"

"Is it? Oh, bollocks, you're right. That's a star, isn't it? What about Polaris?"

"You're awful at this; I'm sorry I asked."

"That one was a joke."

"What about your eye?"

"I don't know. She said that would come soon."

For a second we sat in silence and stared at the kitchen, waiting for the waitress to bring our drinks out.

"So, should we make some kind of game plan or whatever? So we don't waste another night sitting in some thorn bushes?" he asked.

"I suppose." Sometimes I still had the urge to rub on the bridge of my nose when I was thinking about something. My finger slid off onto my cheekbone. Soon I might be able to scratch my nose properly again.

"Well, what are we looking for? I don't even know what we expect-well, maybe we should find out something about him first. So we would have alternatives to sitting out getting thorns in our pants. You could ask your brother about him."

I resisted the urge to pick a fight. "We both went to school with him. We must know something about him."

"I know I thought he was creepy. Can we use that?"

"If only."

"He didn't even play Quidditch or anything. And we didn't have any classes with him, since he was younger."

"I know when they were a lot younger, him and my brother used to do weird potions experiments in the back garden. It was kind of cool, really, they made some explosives and blew up postboxes. Kind of nerdy stuff, though. I think he was kind of a nerd. I don't know. Like a creepy evil nerd."

"So we know he's a creepy nerd who's into killing Muggles, science experiments, and petty vandalism."

"Sounds about right."

"Is there anything we can extrapolate from that? Where he might spend his time?"

I shrugged. "Evil library?"

"I'm serious. I'm trying to get ideas here."

I put my head in my hands. "I am, too."

The waitress came over with the drinks and James paused to thank her and make some stupid jokey comments about the service or something. I didn't look up. I just groped for my drink blindly.

When she walked away, he said, "Well, do you really want to just sit in a van outside his house?"

"Yes."

James pulled at the corners of his mouth. "I wasn't expecting that answer."

"Look, I know you think it's a waste of time. You don't have to go if you don't want. But it's the best way to find out what he's doing. We're not going to get anywhere trying to guess when he's going to show up at an ice cream parlor or something. We know he'll come in and out of his house eventually. Even if it's a boring wait."

"But I don't even think it's true. We can't see in the house. He can Floo. He can Apparate. Even if we see him leave the house, it doesn't really help if he Apparates somewhere two steps later."

I twisted my napkin in my fists. "Well. I still want to do it." And I did. I did think it was the best way to find out what Evan was up to, which is something I wanted to do, if I could do it without tipping him off. If I could convince James not to come with me, without making it seem like I didn't want him there.

I don't know if I'd ever not wanted James with me like this before. I sunk lower in my chair and put a hand over my stomach.

He still hadn't said anything. The waitress was dropping off baskets of chips.

"Well, when do you want to go again?" he asked finally.

I was sprinkling vinegar on the chips and didn't look up. "Do you have any idea where to get a van?"

* * *

I admit, I was excited to go to the Healer the next morning. The appointment was at St. Mungo's. She'd said something about a reconstruction team. I didn't really know. I just knew it was expensive, and as a result I had very high expectations.

The procedure itself they put me to sleep for. When I woke up, I couldn't feel my face.

It was just like that the last time I woke up in St. Mungo's. Opening my eyes to cold white light. Unable to feel. Waking up half a person.

That time, James had been there in the room. He's the first thing I remember after the white light. The first thing I was really capable of registering, maybe. I remember he felt like he had to tell me things, fast, like he had to make me understand before something happened. Before I could get my hopes up, maybe. He told me what happened to me. The abridged version. He told me what he'd done, and what had happened to Regulus. He told me not to worry, because Dumbledore was going to help us. Dumbledore had already got him out of jail. He'd help all of us.

This time, James wasn't here. Lily was supposed to be coming to pick me up. I was staying with them, again, since the Healer said I had to. Lily said I had to.

I tried to feel my face, to see if I had a nose, but the nurse wouldn't let me. I fell back asleep.

The strangest part about waking up the last time had been this jerking feeling in my stomach like I'd just fallen, like I needed to get up and keep going. Last time, I woke up sweating, like I'd just been running, my heart beating up in my ears. I didn't understand it had been better than a day since we'd been attacked outside my flat. It took ten minutes for James to convince me to stay in bed. It took longer for him to make me stop trying to peel the bandages off my face.

When I woke up again, Lily was there, reading an anatomy book in the chair by my bed.

"Good morning, Sunshine," she said. "You're looking dashing."

I tried to sit up and started groping at my face. She swatted my hands away and pushed my chest down.

"Stop that, you know better." She put the textbook down on the floor and slid up closer to the bed.

My hands kept trying to sneak up to my face, seemingly of their own volition. Lily kept smacking them down.

"Give it a few minutes and you'll stop acting mad." She patted my shoulder with one hand and held my wrist down with the other. "How do you feel, otherwise?"

I grunted. I don't know if anything intelligible came out.

"Healer Apperley said it went well. That's your Healer, if, as I'm led to believe, you really don't know her name."

I tried to make an appropriate expression, but I wasn't even sure my face existed anymore. I think I managed to roll my eye back up into my skull.

Lily laughed. "You'll feel better, soon! You look like a mound of marshmallows at the moment, but in a few days all the bandages will come off. Yes, all of them. She's given me-Healer Apperley has given me an eyepatch for you. Aren't you just thrilled? You get to wear an eyepatch. She says in a week or so you'll be well enough to come back for a fitting. For your ocular prosthesis." she tossed her hair over her shoulder as though making a big joke.

For almost an hour, Lily stayed in the room talking to me. About my face and Healer Apperley's instructions. About her latest prenatal appointments and baby naming debates. About her anatomy book, with some off-color comments I suspect were meant to be about her and James's sex life that would have bothered me if I could really process complex thoughts at the time.

Then, I suppose she got bored of waiting and decided I could come home now.

She got me out of bed and I think tried to put her arm around me for support, but failed to take into account that I was half-a-foot taller and she was pregnant and off-balance. I could tell I was about to fall on her, but there was nothing I could do about it. After that, she got me a wheelchair.

We were halfway through the lobby, my head lolling up and down on my weak neck, when I heard Lily say, "Oh, hi, Emmeline!"

I jerked my head forward and felt something what, presumably drool, dribble down my chin.

"Hi Lily! Hi Sirius." She was walking across the lobby toward us, bouncing on the balls of her feet and her teeth showing.

I still could not verify the existence of the muscles in my face, so I couldn't even try to smile friendly-like, much less return her greeting.

"What are you doing here?" Lily stopped pushing my wheelchair, which caused my head to flop forward and my chin bounce against my chest.

Emmeline said something I couldn't follow for the buzzing in my ears and the inability of my brain to process words consisting of more than two syllables.

Lily's voice was easier to parse, like I was a dog that only understood its owner. "Sirius got a new nose today." I think I felt her hand tug on my hair to center my head on my neck. I tried my very best to smile but only succeeded in spilling drool down my front.

Emmeline laughed and I saw her lips move like she was saying something. Suddenly, she slipped and fell sideways. I lunged forward to catch her.

It was only when I realized that the two of them and a nurse were picking me up off the floor and putting me back in the wheelchair that I understood she hadn't been falling at all. I guess my head must have drifted to my shoulder.

When we got home-to James and Lily's-she-Lily-burst out laughing. I was somehow on the sofa with my head propped up against the cushions. Lily flopped down next to me.

"Oh my god. I'm sorry, Sirius. You just couldn't have been more perfect. When you fell out of the wheelchair. What were you doing? You looked like you were making a break for it."

I closed my eye and heard a low gurgling noise issue from my throat.

"Oh, Sirius," Lily said. "I'm sorry. She knows it was just the drugs." She couldn't keep the laughter out of her voice for long. "But if you could've seen yourself." I felt her slapping the sofa cushions between us with mirth.

When I woke up later, James was home. He patted me on top of the head. "You look beautiful already," he said, smiling down at me.

I sat up and tried to rub at my eye, but my knuckle twisted the new thick set of bandages and when Lily saw, she slapped my fist and told me I better stop because if I kept messing the dressings up, she wasn't going to keep fixing them. She was not impressed when I told her I didn't remember messing them up in the first place.

That night Lily and James ate spaghetti. I tried to take part, but I still hadn't re-mastered the art of chewing and swallowing, which suddenly seemed mercilessly difficult. Lily wouldn't even let me have a glass of wine with them.

I was trying to twist a strand of spaghetti around my fork and slurp it through my teeth when Lily said, "So, I invited Emmeline over for dinner tomorrow night."

My fork fell out of my hand and spaghetti sauce splashed on my shirt and James's face. I started to laugh at that, but the smile died on my face when I remembered what Lily had just said.

I was still trying to string a couple of words together when Lily caught my eye. "You were there," she said. "You heard it."

I shook my head.

"Oh, bollocks, really? I thought you were-well, it doesn't matter. She's coming. I think it'll be fun. You'll be able to eat properly by then." She took her napkin and scrubbed at the corner of my mouth. Even James looked at her askance.

"He'll still be wrapped up like a bloody mummy, though, won't he?" James said.

I nodded at him.

"So? He has been for months. She doesn't care about that."

I looked at James and tried to make meaningful eye contact.

"Whoa, what does that mean? Why should he care what she cares about?"

I nodded vigorously.

"Well, he doesn't have to, but I'm just saying, in case, you know, someone thought it was awkward."

James shoved spaghetti into his mouth. "Why should he have to feel awkward; this is his home. Besides, she's the one who's friends with that twat Benjy Fenwick. If anyone's going to feel awkward, she should. About her bad taste in friends."

I wanted to kiss him.

"I don't want anyone to feel awkward, and of course she doesn't think like that prick Fenwick." She smiled and reached out for James's hand.

James took his hand away. "We think she's faking sympathy to get close to him. On Fenwick's instructions."

"We?"

"Yeah, me and Sirius."

"Why can't you let Sirius speak for himself?"

I made a slashing motion across my throat and shook my head.

"Cos he can't talk!"

"Oh, yes he can, he-yes, you can, Sirius, you just don't want to." She looked at me, and I shrank back into my chair.

"He doesn't want to cos he doesn't want to argue with you about you trying to set him up with-the enemy!"

Lily laughed. "You're mad, Emmeline is not the enemy."

"If she thinks Sirius has anything to do with Voldemort or Death Eaters, she's my enemy."

"Well, she doesn't. If she thought Sirius had anything to do with any of that, of course I wouldn't have invited her. Of course no one thinks Sirius has anything to do with Voldemort or Death Eaters."

"Look, I don't want you to argue," I said. My voice cracked, and I tugged at the ends of my hair poking out from the bandages. "I've got a baby name for you. What about Harold? The old man down the street who used to give me sweets was named Harold, everyone called him Harry. Once someone accused him of putting razorblades in the sweets, but I know that's not true, that's just neighborhood busybodies, my mum hated him, of course, which is why I like the name so much, it brings back these good memories-"

They both stared at me without blinking.

"Sirius," Lily said. Her lip was drawn up and her eyebrows knotted. "We're not naming our baby after some creepy old man who tried to kill or molest you as a child."

"Yeah, I can agree to that," James said.

"Well, you're not arguing anymore. You're welcome."

Lily rolled her eyes. "I knew you could talk." She crossed her arms over her chest.

I rubbed at my jaw, which was beginning to hurt. I don't know what the Healer did to my mouth. If I remember correctly, she was supposed to be working on my nose.

"Well, what do you think about Emmeline coming over, then?" James said. He had his fork clenched in his fist like he was going to stab me with it if I didn't answer right. I took my hands off the table.

"Er, I reckon it might be. Well, Lily, honestly, she is kind of sleeping with the enemy."

James put his fork down, but Lily's face turned bright red. "She is not sleeping with him-with anyone-"

"Well, we can't assume things about her personal life." James laughed. "Since you're definitely not close enough with her to know anything like that, which, incidentally, is why it's such a mystery to me you insisting on this dinner so… fervently."

"I like her, and I think you're unfairly judging her, and I'm not doing anything 'fervently', you jackass, and well, it's too late to uninvited her now, she's coming."

"Oh yeah, you're clearly totally dispassionate. Why don't we just say we all came down with dragonpox or something?"

"Dragonpox is always your stupid excuse, you've been using it since school, how many times in your life have you contracted this is debilitating and often fatal viral infect now?"

"Okay." I pushed my plate away. "I'm pretty good at prolonging stupid arguments. But this is just. Well, its' stressing me out and it's stupid, let's just drop it and whatever, we'll get through it tomorrow night."

"So, you're taking her side?"

"Wow, so sorry our marital problems aren't fascinating enough for you."

I sputtered. I thought I was going to face-plant into my spaghetti.

Then, Lily punched me in the arm and smiled. James blew a raspberry, and I put my head in my hands.

"It's not fair to gang up on me like that."

"We didn't plan it," James said.

"But look how it's brought us together."

"I'm going to bed," I said. And I did.


	12. Chapter 12

I lay in bed thinking that I probably ought to visit my brother again, soon. He was going to ask me about our parents, though. I wouldn't have anything to say about that. Maybe I ought to just let Evan do the visiting. According to him, Regulus was still himself about three-quarters of the time. The other quarter, I wasn't used to Evan looking uncomfortable, but he did when he mentioned that figure, so I left it at that. I told myself, if he were happy, we wouldn't be doing this. Of course he's not happy. I just hoped he'd still be him, you know, when we got him out. Whoever that was. I worried Evan and I had different ideas about that, and I didn't know who was right. Evan knew him better.

* * *

The next day, I was mostly unconscious or sucking tapioca through a straw until around 6:00, when Lily started getting dinner ready.

After she put the pot roast in the oven, she grabbed me under the arm and dragged me upstairs. I had been lying on the sofa.

She brought me to the washroom and sat me down on the toilet lid.

"I thought you'd be less dopey by this time, honestly," she said, squinting into my face. "Your pupils are gigantic. How much of that potion did you take?"

"Er. Normal amount."

"Well, I'm not even going to ask what a 'normal amount' is for you." She pushed my hair back off my forehead. She was leaning down in front of me, and I tried not to stare at her tits. They were a lot bigger since she was pregnant. It's not like I was keeping notes on them or anything, but it was impossible not to notice.

"What are you doing?" I asked.

She poked the thick gauze covering my nose with her fingertip.

"Ow." I pushed her away and covered my nose with my hand.

"I'm trying to see if I can take these bandages off and make you look like a normal person."

"No, you can't. Why?"

She sat down on the edge of the tub and rubbed her knees with her palms. "You're probably right. But I really want to try. Can I take off the bandages?"

"No." I pulled my hand closer to my face and narrowed my eye at her. "My nose-god willing I have one-is probably the size of a pumpkin. Those ones Hagrid grows. Leave it alone. Why are you bothered about it?"

"It's nothing. I mean. I'm not. Bothered. But it's just that with Emmeline coming over."

"You're the one who invited her over the day after I got a new nose put on. It's not my fault I'm a mess."

"I know. You're right. I just thought it would be nice, you know. I know you get kind of lonely, or, I don't know what you want to call it, but I just like Emmeline, and I think you're wrong about her, and you'd like her if you knew her, and I think that she really does like you."

"You need to not try to set me up with people."

"This is the first time I've done it, and we don't even know it's not gone well, yet." She put her head in her hands. Her knuckles stuck out through her glossy hair. I'd read somewhere that pregnancy hormones could make a woman's hair shinier.

I put my hand on her shoulder. "It will go badly," I said. "And it's nice of you to worry about me, but don't. It really just makes things worse. Well, I mean, not always. Really, most of the time when you worry about me it's for the best. Like when you got me at the hospital. But right now, this time, and really any time involving my love life. Just. Don't worry about it."

She looked up at me. "I just want you to be happy."

"Okay, don't make me vomit. I am happy. I'm plenty happy. I know it must seem this way when you're in your big happy marriage, but I don't need a girlfriend to be happy. Really."

"Yeah, okay." Her nose wrinkled and her eyes shifted to the side. "It's just that, well, you don't really seem happy."

"I'm fine, but even if that weren't the case, one thing I can tell you is setting me up with Emmeline Vance isn't going to make me better."

She opened her mouth, but I stood up before she could say anything. "The bandages are staying on." I walked out of the toilet.

"What about just some makeup, like, face contouring kind of thing?" she called from behind me. "Do you want to wear the eyepatch? It'll make you look cool!"

* * *

Emmeline came over around 8:00. I had already told James what Lily's game was.

He laughed about it. I reckon it was funny, but it made me feel like something sticky was sloshing around at the bottom of my stomach. I don't know what she really believed about me, but it made me feel guilty that when I looked at her, when I looked at her dark hair with her fringe getting in her eyes and the way she shifted on her feet, all I felt was a bit queasy.

"Hi, Sirius. Are you feeling any better today?" she asked. She touched my elbow. I didn't feel it so much as see her arm flick out towards me and draw back again into her body.

"Yes," I said. I didn't know if she knew about Lily's set up. I wanted to give her the benefit of the doubt, but I also wanted to go home and hide under the covers.

"Good. You look better."

Beads of sweat gathered on my forehead. I didn't know what to say, because I knew how I looked, and it wasn't good.

At the table, it was easy, cos I could just shovel steamed broccoli into my mouth and make some noise through it that could sound like agreeing or disagreeing or making some kind of neutral filler comment.

Eventually, Lily crossed her knife over my fork to stop me scooping more broccoli onto my plate.

I did not fail to notice she turned the blade towards me when she did so.

"So, Lily, are you still working on your Healer license?" Emmeline asked, politely not looking down at our clashing utensils.

"Oh, when I get the time, I'm working on it. But it's hard to find the time." Lily laughed shrilly. She was trying hard to make this conversation pleasant. She hated talking about her slow progress towards her license.

I put my hands in my lap and glanced at James, who was turning a kind of blotchy red. I stifled a laugh.

"Yes, I know how hard it is to focus on a job or studying with everything going on."

Lily nodded deeply. Her smile looked painful. She swallowed half her glass of water in one go.

I tried to save her. "Yeah, speaking of everything going on, James and I have been having a great time stalking Evan Rosier."

Lily's upper lip twitched and the color in James's face pulsated. Emmeline, to her credit, cocked her head to the side and in a tone of genuine interest, said, "Oh?"

"Yeah. Sat all night outside his house." Lily kicked at me under the table but hit the table leg instead and chomped on her lip to keep from cursing. "Course, we didn't find out anything at all, but you can tell your friend Fenwick we're trying." And I'd started out with such good intentions.

"He'll be happy to hear it," Emmeline said.

I laughed.

"Sirius, leave it," James muttered.

But the thing was, once I started, it was hard to stop.

"I thought I might as well get my say in, if you're going to be reporting back to him, anyway."

"God, don't be a twat. I mean, you're so funny." Lily was going to turn me into a toad and boil me in a stew after Emmeline left.

"No, Lily, it's okay," Emmeline said. "I thought we got over this the other night, but I suppose not."

"I'm sorry I can't let it go so easily when I'm being accused of being part of something reprehensible, something I've done nothing but fight against. Yes, that kind of gets under my skin. And I know you'll say you're not responsible for what your friends think. But you do know and hear what he says, and every time I see you, I remember there are people out there, people I'm meant to work with, people whom I'm meant to trust and who're meant to trust me, who believe I'm everything I hate. And all because I loved my brother, and I wanted to help him do one worthwhile thing in his life. So, sorry I'm not much of a dinner companion."

I looked down at my plate and poked my pot roast with my fork. I didn't hear anything except the buzzing in my own ears until James said, "You know what, I'm sorry. Lily. But Sirius is right. Emmeline, you seem like a lovely person. But people like Fenwick need to be called out on their bullshit. I'm ashamed I didn't do it myself at that meeting. If you really do believe Sirius, how can you not say something?"

Emmeline gathered her hair up. I could see goose flesh coming up on her arms from across the table. "Well, I wanted to talk to you about something. Only, I didn't really know how to bring it up. Sirius, the other day Benjy followed you to Dagenham."

I froze.

Emmeline's face pinkened. "He followed you, and he saw you go into a house with who he thought was Evan Rosier. I don't want to make any accusations, but he's going to tell Moody and Dumbledore. I convinced him not to until I talked to you first."

"And now seemed like the opportune time for that?" I said. I knew it wasn't the right thing to say, but I said it anyway. Lily and James sat silent on either side of me.

Emmeline looked down. "Well, you brought it up."

I put my hand over my eyes and eye socket and squeezed my temples. I knew I owed Lily and James an explanation, and I wanted to give it before they started asking questions on their own. "He's right. I did go see Rosier." I looked up at James. "And I'm sorry I didn't tell you. I really should have. That's why I was acting so weird, when we were talking about you know, staking out his house or whatever. But I volunteered in the first place because I want to know the truth about him. He was my brother's best friend. Is, I suppose. And I lied when I said that didn't bother me." James was looking at me with contorted eyebrows, sucking on his lips. I couldn't tell what he was thinking, so I kept talking. "He found me, first. He came up to me in the town."

"What did he want?" Lily said. I wasn't looking at her.

"He wanted to talk about how my brother was doing. Mostly. I don't know why, not like there's anything to be done about it. But he was angry, like I am, about how he's being treated. I went to talk to him again in Dagenham because he asked me to and because this was after the Order meeting, when I knew we wanted to find out as much as possible about him."

"So, what did you find out?" James asked, never letting the corner of his lip slip from in between his teeth.

"Honestly, if there was much to tell you, I would have by now. I was disappointed and a little embarrassed because I didn't find out hardly anything. He wouldn't talk about his father and of course I couldn't just ask him if he's a Death Eater. We mostly just talked about Regulus."

I could see Emmeline nodding out the corner of my eye.

James looked at his plate and pushed his broccoli around with his fork. "Yeah, okay. Why didn't you tell me?"

I popped all the knuckles in my hand at once. I wished Lily and Emmeline would go away. Mostly Emmeline. "I'm sorry. I should have, but I didn't think you'd understand." I wanted to tell him more, but I couldn't know. "You don't like my brother, and I know you wouldn't like me, I don't know. Dwelling on it."

James didn't look up. He kept picking at his food until he was just scraping the tines of his fork on the plate. "I would've tried to understand," he said. "I would've tried to help."

"I'm sorry." I stood up. "I need the toilet." My legs felt gelatinous.

When I was almost out of the room, I heard Lily say, "Does that satisfy that cunt Fenwick?"

That comment made me more relaxed coming back to the table. It didn't seem like they were going to throw me out or call the Aurors. Though the way James refused to look at me was as bad as any of that.

Emmeline said she understood, and she would see what she could do about Fenwick. She looked worried, though. Her eyes were big and she kept brushing her hair behind her ears.

I made sure James was out of earshot when I said, "And you tell that creep if I hear about him following me around again, we're going to have more than words. If he can't mind his own fucking business. Have a good night, Emmeline, it was nice to see you."

I went to help wash dishes. Lily was blithely scrubbing like nothing had happened, but James wasn't in the room.

"So, are you friends with him?" she asked, handing me a plate to dry.

"No. Of course not." I fished my wand out of my pocket. "He's weird." I dried the dish and sent it to the cabinet.

"Well, I didn't mean actual friends. I mean, are you friendly with him?"

I didn't know what the right answer was. I frowned. "Friendly enough. I haven't picked a fight, in any case. Why?"

"I just seems to me, maybe, this could be…" She shrugged. "Useful." Her arms stopped moving, her hands still submerged. "If you're friendly with him, well, that's a better way to spy than just sitting outside his house." She started washing again.

I looked at my hands and peeled off a snagged fingernail. "James would hate that," I said. "He volunteered so we could do it together."

"He doesn't even want to do it, though. As you know. To tell you the truth, I understand why you didn't tell him. Us. You're right, James doesn't like your brother and doesn't like you spending time worrying about him. He doesn't understand what it's like. My relationship with Petunia isn't the same, but I know what it's like to want things to be better. With your sibling. I still miss her, and James doesn't really get that either. To him, they're not any different than your average, everyday bigot. But to us, they're family." She laughed. "I still always invite Petunia and Vernon for holidays."

"Regulus isn't like Petunia. Well, he was worse. But now, he trying to do something good and look where that got him. I don't like Rosier. He creeps me out, and I'm not sure he's not dangerous. But he's the only other person who gives a fuck. Who even knows him at all. Other than our parents, which, good luck to me trying to get their sympathies."

"Well, keep talking to Rosier, then, if you want. And if you can find out something, that's even better. Either way, you'll be keeping an eye on him. And I'll talk to James. He'll be okay. He just gets jealous." She wasn't even looking at me. I watched her over the sink in profile. Her hair fell down over her ear and dangled over the suds.

"Thanks, Lily," I said.


	13. Chapter 13

The next day in Dagenham, Evan brought a map to pin up on the wall.

I sat cross-legged on the shag carpet in front of the sofa with a scotch in one hand and a cigarette in the other while he stuck the map up to the right of the fake fireplace.

The map was big, of England up to Scandinavia, with Iceland in the upper left-hand corner. I suspected the North Sea was the relevant bit of this map. I also doubted we needed a map at all.

"So, are you going to tell me what went on on your date with this guy?" I sucked on my cigarette.

"Very funny." Evan smoothed the map against the wall. "And yes, I am." He turned around and grabbed his scotch glass from the mantle.

"Did you find out where Azkaban is?"

"You just cut right to the chase, don't you?"

I stared at him.

"Did you get your nose done? Your face looks puffier. And your voice is… nasally-er."

"Yes, thank you. What did you get out of him?"

He smiled and turned back to the map. He pointed his wand at a spot in the ocean just west of Norway. A little red spot appeared on the map. "Ta-da."

"Are you sure?"

"Well, to be honest, it's kind of an approximation." He put the end of his wand in his mouth and stared at the map.

"Great."

"It's a fine place to start, even if it's not exact."

"Well, it's not like we can test it out before we go," I said. I flicked the end of my cigarette into the fireplace.

"No, not us. Yeah. But think of the Muggles who've come near it. Just incidentally. I'm sure it's got protections like Hogwarts. Any Muggle comes close and he suddenly remembers he left the stove on, or forgot to lock the front door."

"When he's out in the ocean."

"Well, something like that. Maybe he sees a bunch of icebergs. Use your imagination. And a wizard comes near and alarms and lasers and whatnot go off. Maybe vaporizing force fields, I don't know, we'll have to find out."

"I won't be the one to find that out, I can tell you that much."

"You're very brave, Sirius, I've always said that." He smiled.

"Well, you seem to think this is good news."

"Yes, in fact, I do. What's not good about it?"

"Well, how do you propose we go about finding the place, given we can't come near it?"

"Oh, I've got a brilliant idea, listen to this." He put his hands out like he was framing a picture. "So Muggles will just turn around, right?"

"Right, and we're not Muggles."

"Yes, well spotted. My point is, what do Muggles do on the open ocean? Cruises, fishing, and I believe whale watching. So, what we do is we charter some kind of a fishing boat, yeah? I've looked into it a bit, sometimes Muggles do that sort of thing on holiday."

"So, what, we can get burned to bits with fishing rods in our hands? And then there'll be stories in the Muggle tabloids about a couple of tossers spontaneously combusting on their Norwegian chartered fishing expedition."

"Seems like you've given this a load of thought."

"Seems like you haven't." I started gnawing on the flesh of my thumb. Lily had noticed I was shredding my cuticles and threatened to put socks on my hands like they did to dogs who wouldn't stop chewing on their paws. She thought that was a laugh. She'd inherited from James the idea that any joke that made parallels between me and a dog was hilarious.

"That won't happen. The spontaneous combustion."

"Even if it doesn't, what are we meant to do once—I mean, if—we find the Muggle-repelling shield?"

"Push them overboard?"

"Your contention that you're not a Death Eater gets weaker and weaker with every Muggle murdering joke, you do realize?"

"Don't be ridiculous, you don't have to be a Death Eater to be a pureblood supremacist." He grinned.

"I have a real question. Most likely, there's some kind of spell out there protecting Azkaban, but we don't have a fucking clue what it is. I don't know, maybe it turns everyone with brown eyes into a sea urchin."

"In that case we'd both be safe, so where's the problem?" His smile was insufferable.

"Yeah, I don't know what made me choose that as an example. But what makes you so sure you know what's going on out there?"

"I'm nearly positive about the Muggle-repelling charms. Hogwarts has it, every Quidditch World Cup site has it, every major site out in the open like that-"

"No." I shook my head. "No, some sites-landmarks, domiciles, what have you, don't have that. For instance, my parents' house is just invisible to Muggles."

"Yes, and to everyone else who doesn't know where it is. That's what being unplottable is. Those places become visible when you know what you're looking for. Azkaban must have protections beyond that. They can't have Muggles stumbling on the island, even if all they see is a rock outcropping."

"Okay. Fair. Sounds fair. But there's a million different spells out there. It seems foolhardy to assume we know what one is, just because it's been used in similar situations."

"Yes." Evan knotted his fingers in one of his curls and pulled it down to his mouth. "But this is government work we're talking about. Maybe if you or I were creating shields and protective spells, we'd be a bit more innovative, but bureaucracy isn't known for its creativity."

"It is known for its disorganization, though. And you said it yourself, the place has been around for like 5,000 years. They probably had different standards back then, yeah?" I point my wand and levitated a sofa cushion I had earlier thrown on the carpet.

He didn't respond right away. I liked it when I could stump him. Usually, I reckoned he just made something up on the spot when he didn't have a genuine answer.

"Do you have any ideas, then?" he said, finally. He sounded tired. When I looked up, I saw he was sitting on the carpet, leaning against the wall and the fake fireplace.

"Now that you mention it, I reckon we ought to invest our time in defensive spells. You know, sort of shields, so we have a way to protect against whatever it is we find when we get there." I jerked my wand and shot the cushion up to the ceiling. A rain of dust fell down to the ground.

Evan coughed. "All right, but how?"

"Well, you just think of the kind of thing that could go wrong and figure out how to stop those things. Like, I might not throw this pillow at you, but if I did, how would you defend yourself?" I dropped the pillow over his head and he Vanished it without even looking up. "See? That kind of thing."

"Except about a million times more complicated."

"I'd say that's a conservative estimate."

He put his head in his hands.

"Well look, it's not so bad. Say it's an incinerator field? We'd have to figure how to get through, right? So, we do that, and we also figure out how to get through whatever other protections they might have. And we just figure out how to do it all simultaneously." I picked up another pillow and sent it cartwheeling across the room.

"This is never going to work," he said.

"Just minutes ago, you were so sure about this." It was just like he was determined to feel the exact opposite of me. I sliced the pillow open and started assaulting his head with a barrage of pillow stuffing.

He swatted it away.

"It's not such a big deal. We'll just do some research. Surprisingly, I know how to read. We'll have it worked out in a week."

"And then what? We get through their shield and even if twenty different kinds of alarms aren't going off, we've still got to get to the building, get in it, get past the guards and dementors, get to Regulus, get him-sick and possibly unconscious-out and back to shore without being killed or caught. It hasn't been done for hundreds of years. Nearly a millennium and no one's broken out."

"Yeah, but did any of those people get all Os on their OWLs?"

"Oh, leave it."

I left him promising I would go to the library and see what I could find out. It seemed like I was making a lot of promises I did not necessarily intend to keep, lately.

* * *

For the second time in as many days, I was sitting on the toilet with Lily crouched in front of me. I had had similar nightmares in school, but those had involved my pants around my ankles and no layers of bandages on my face, Lily being Professor McGonagall, and, usually, no James hovering over her shoulder egging her on.

"Okay." Lily sucked in a breath and reached up. She hooked her finger around the end of the bandages and started unwinding.

James was laughable, standing behind her, gnawing on his fingernails. I couldn't tell if he were making fun of me, or just behaving deranged for other reasons.

I had a mirror in my hand, but honestly, I wasn't champing at the bit the look into it. It wasn't going to look like I wanted. It wasn't going to look like me.

The last of the bandages dropped and Lily collected the last bits of gauze padding. Her eyes were widening and James was biting down on his knuckle. I felt like Frankenstein's monster being unveiled.

"Here!" Lily said, grabbing my wrist to stop me raising the mirror. "Put the eyepatch on first, so you can focus on the nose."

I considered telling her to cut it out. But I reckon I just wanted to please them.

I let her slip the eyepatch on over my head, but I couldn't help rolling my still existing eye while I did.

When I looked back at her, Lily was smiling giddily. James was still biting his knuckle.

"Okay, look," she said and pushed the mirror in my hand up.

My heart fell in my chest when I saw myself. I reckoned the nose was still a bit swollen, but it was there. It was there and aside from a little discoloration where it met my real flesh, it looked like me. Like mine.

"Those gray bits will fade," Lily said. "It's the synthetic flesh matching the real stuff." She clasped her hands together like she was praying. James kept biting his knuckle.

I pressed the end of my nose with my fingertip. It was squishy and soft with something that felt like cartilage behind it. I thought I was even beginning to get feeling in it. When I flicked it, it made me want to sneeze a bit.

I put the mirror down and looked at Lily. She shrieked and threw her arms around my neck. I laughed and looked up at James. He still had that damn knuckle between his teeth.

"Well, what do you think?" I asked. "How do I look?" I tried to smile at him.

"You look great," he said. It sounded like he was going to cry. He stuck his knuckle back in his mouth.

"Hey, you bender, I think you may be right about the sympathy hormones," I said. I extracted myself from Lily's grip and hugged James.

His arms wrapped around my ribcage loosely. "It really does look good," he said.

"Yeah, I reckon I could pull birds now and everything." I laughed even as my hand reached up to run over the scars on my face. They were always new and raw. I reckoned it was part of the cursed bit.

Lily squealed again. "All right, this is just brilliant. I'm feeling so inspired, I'm off to revise. Why don't you boys go for a drink, yeah?" She slapped mine and James's shoulders at once.

She left. I felt a bit strange, just standing in the toilet, then, so I went out and sat in the living room. James followed.

I kept feeling my bare face and slipping my thumb under the eyepatch. I didn't like wearing it. It made me feel like a cinema villain or some kind of geek pretending to be a pirate.

"Lily told me if I saw you doing that, I had to tell you to stop," he said.

"I know. Bollocks." I put my hand between my knees and rocked forward in my seat. I looked at him. He was staring down at his feet. "I'm sorry, James. Really, I am."

"I know you are. I don't know. Everything's so weird, lately." He wouldn't look up at me. He bit his lip and took a couple of slow breaths. "And it's going to get worse, I know. Not just with you, necessarily, at all. But our whole lives. My son is going to come into this terrible world."

I bit the inside of my mouth. "Well, that's what we're doing, is trying to make the world not so terrible."

"You don't have to do that, Sirius. I know you, of all people. Look, I need to hear someone else say they know how horrible things are. You know. You could just say you know."

"I know. I know how bad things are."

"I'm sorry I'm hard on you about your brother. I know he's important to you, but you've got to understand-you do understand, don't you, why I don't trust him."

"Well, no, not really. If he weren't trustworthy, why on earth would he be in Azkaban right now? He didn't need to do any of what he did."

James grimaced, like he was forcing a lot of arguments back down his throat. "Do you trust Rosier, then, too? Do you think he just wants a support group?"

"No, I don't trust him. Far from it. But well, I don't know Lily made this good point about you not getting it cos you're an only child." I grabbed a sofa cushion and buried my chin in it.

"What, so I'm selfish or spoiled?" He looked so offended, I laughed.

"Well yeah, about being spoiled, anyway. But I didn't mean it like that, you tosser. Just, you don't know what it's like to have this relationship that no matter what-no what what, he's still my brother. That'll always mean something. Even when I hate him, or he's a twat or trying to kill me."

"So, because I've never joined any terrorist organizations or been a horrible bigot who apparently suddenly gets a heart of gold that means I don't get to have some of mystical unbreakable bond that mere mortals could never hope to understand, then, does it?"

Sometimes James being an insufferable twat buoyed my spirits. I lunged across the sofa and put the pillow in my hands over his face.

He started thrashing around, but I put all my body weight on him. "Prongs, our unbreakable bond is the most mystical magical thing in this whole magical world." I pulled the cushion off his face and pressed a sloppy kiss on his cheek.

It still hurt a bit, to put pressure on my face, but I was so happy I was normal again, or nearly normal. I felt like a real person. I held James down and stuck my tongue in his ear.

He yelled and kicked me in the balls. Not hard. But enough to make me fall back on the floor, wincing.

"Stop trying to put your penis in me; I'm married! To a woman. With big tits!" He put his knees up to his chest and glared down at me. He pushed his glasses up his nose.

"That doesn't count, it's just the pregnancy that's made her tits big."

"So, you've been looking at my wife's tits, then, have you?"

I pointed my wand at his nose and yanked on his nose hairs.

He nearly rocketed off the sofa, and his wand fell out of his pocket and rolled onto the floor.

I grabbed it and jumped out of his reach just as he tried to collar me.

I hooted, waving one wand in each hand and dancing around by the foot of the stairs.

James tried to set his jaw and look hard, but it was hard to take him seriously when he kept sticking his fingers up his nose and rubbing on the inside of his nostrils.

"You remember what happened the last time we fought, don't you?" he said, setting himself with his shoulders squared and hands out in front of him.

"What, you mean when I got a little nosebleed and you started crying about it?"

"You can't have a nosebleed when you haven't got a nose, you twat."

"Well, I've got one now, so do your worst." I turned and shoved both the wands in the table by the bottom of the stairs.

"Oh, come off it. I'm not going to beat you up, you're like an invalid."

"You're right, you're not going to beat me up, but it's nothing to do with me. You couldn't beat me up if I were a quadriplegic on my death bed."

"Because why would I, you're a dying quadriplegic-"

I lunged forward and stuck my fingers in his ribcage.

He squealed like a piglet and doubled over, batting at my hands. He tried to turn away, and I got my arms wrapped around his middle. He leaned forward, hoisted me off the ground, and slammed me into the sofa. I got my elbow around his neck and choked him while he threw all his puny weight into pushing me into the sofa. Then he started pinching. I squirmed out from under him and he grabbed my arm to try to force it behind my back.

Suddenly, the house shook. I felt the floor move under my feet, the floorboards squeaking. I looked back at James. He stopped twisting my arm and just held onto my shoulder.

For about two beats, the house was quiet except for the aftershocks. I twisted my fist in the sleeve of James's shirt. He pulled me closer to him. Then, on the far side of the room, the fire surged up in the hearth.

James jumped toward it, and I lunged at the table for our wands.

"James," I yelled, down on my knees.

The fire was still flaring and it seemed clear now someone was Flooing us. I jumped up and kept both wands out in front of me.

About that time, Peter rolled out onto the carpet, choking and holding his head.

James kneeled down and helped him sit up. "Are you okay, mate, what's going on?"

Peter kept his hands on his head. "I think I've banged my head in your chimney," he said.

"Nearly tore the house in two," I said. "Thank god for your thick skull."

"Right, but why've you come? Is everything all right?"

"Well, no, not exactly." Peter looked up. His face was sooty and there was a bloody lump rising over his temple. "Well, the rub is that Benjy Fenwick's been… Attacked. At his home, I-I was at the Ministry when it happened-when the Aurors heard, and Moody sent me to fetch you, and-"

"Hold on, is this still-"

"Where do we go? How do we get there?"

"I thought we might try the Floo-"

"And be sitting ducks when we roll out on the hearth coughing up a lung like you? I don't think so." I kneeled down next to them.

"Now that you mention it, there might not be a hearth to, er, roll out on, anyway." Peter dabbed at his temple with his shirttail.

"Two of us can go on my motorbike. Where does he live?"

Peter coughed. "I know how to get there."

"Right, then, you two go, I'll go back to the Ministry and see if I can find something out."

Before either Peter or I could say anything, James threw a handful of powder in the fire and stepped in.

"All right, Pete?" I dusted off his back and pulled him to his feet.

"Yeah, let's go."

It took us five minutes on my motorbike to get to Fenwick's. When we dipped below the clouds, we saw the green Surrey countryside was marred with a smoking black spot.

"That's his house," Peter yelled over the wind. He threw his arm over my shoulder and pointed down below us.

As we got closer to the ground, we could see the last of the embers burning in the rubbish that had been Fenwick's house and several sooty figures shooting water at the ruins.

I held back from landing until one of the smudged figures began waving. I couldn't see much definition, but Peter waved back and yelled, "Gideon!" in my ear.

We touched down and Gideon came over to us. He wasn't smiling. "Thanks for coming, lads, but I don't think there's much for you to do, now." He looked back over his shoulder at the ruins. "We've just about got the fire out."

"Where's Fenwick?" I asked, looking over Gideon's shoulder. I saw Marlene McKinnon, Emmeline, Frank Longbottom, and Sturgis Podmore, but not Fenwick.

"We don't know." Gideon shook his head. "That's being optimistic. We found something in the ashes."

"What? What did you find?"

I felt Pete shiver by my side.

"Well. It's a hand. Probably his, but we don't know for sure."

I felt my lip curling back and Pete coughed. "Oh my god," he said.

"I suppose what's left here is just to sift through the wreckage. You know, in case we turn up anything that could. Help." Gideon's focus shifted. He looked pale and swallowed hard.

* * *

We spent a couple of hours sifting through the burnt remains of Fenwick's house. When it got too dark to see, we all regrouped and met back in Hogsmeade.

I hadn't said a word to Emmeline while we were at the site, but at the Three Broomsticks, I felt I had to do something.

On the way to the private room upstairs, I tapped her arm. "I'm so sorry," I said. It was so hard not to sound insincere. Not that I was, but after everything. I didn't know what the right expression to make was and ended up with a kind of grimace.

She shook her head. Her hair was wild and there were cuts up and down her arms. Her hand was wrapped in gauze. "Not now," she said and pushed ahead up the stairs.

James and Lily were already there, hands locked together. I looked around for Remus but didn't see him.

There weren't enough chairs in the room, and I felt too weak to conjure anything, so I just sat down on the floor in front of James and leaned against his legs. Peter sat down next to me. I slapped his knee and he just shifted uncomfortably.

"Do you know anything?" Lily asked.

"We didn't find anything," Peter said.

I just shook my head. I, for one, didn't know what there was to discuss here. Fenwick was obviously dead, killed by Death Eaters. He'd been a pureblood, but that didn't mean much, anymore. Probably they just saw an opportunity and took it. I'd been there, and I didn't reckon there was any evidence we could gather from the site. Even his hand, which they found half-a-Quidditch pitch away from the house was mostly charred flesh and bone. Sturgis Podmore said it looked like it had been burned before it was cut off-there wasn't any cauterization on the wrist wound. So they guy had probably burned to death anyway and they were just taunting us with some kind of body part trail, and I, for one, was not keen on taking the bait.

James put his hand on my head. I could tell he wanted to scratch me behind the ears, but that was a bit weird to do in public. I closed my eye and sighed. Peter was worrying about something beside me, but I wasn't listening.

"Where is Remus?" I asked him.

"Dunno," Peter said. "Haven't seen him lately. Gosh, do you think it'd be rude to go get dinner before the meeting? I'm starved."

"No, you twat, someone just died," I hissed. I only hissed to keep from laughing, though.

"You could do with some starving," James said, and Lily smacked him.

Under normal circumstances, I would've made a joke about Peter stealing James's food, the skinny bastard. But I didn't want Lily to hit me, too. I was tired. It felt like James was braiding my hair, but he definitely did not know how to braid.

When the meeting started, Moody began by telling us what had happened, as though we didn't already know.

At around 4:00 pm, Fenwick's patronus showed in Emmeline's garden. The bandage on her hand, she had sliced her palm with the pruning shears when she saw the patronus was what Lily said. I didn't know how she knew that. Emmeline sent her patronus on to the Ministry. She was the first one at Fenwick's house. She didn't wait for Marlene or the others, all of whom had been at the Ministry at the time.

When she got there, she found the house in full flame. She said she tried to go in. She couldn't get far. There were still soot marks on her face. All over her. When I looked at her, I felt ashamed of myself. She said she knew it looked bad but we couldn't give up. Benjy wouldn't have given up on any of us.

I fanned my face with my shirt.

We don't know what we may have lost in the fire, Moody said.

The rest of the meeting was basically a screed about constant vigilance, which was nothing new (though it would prod James, Lily, and I to update the protective spells on their house and my flat).

After the meeting, I was dawdling by the bar waiting for the crowd to filter out when someone grabbed my elbow.

"I wanted to talk to you," Emmeline said. Beneath the dirt and soot, her eyes were sunk deep in their sockets and red rimmed.

"Yes?" I tried to look very attentive, but I'm sure I just looked tired, too, and probably over-concerned about the lager in my hands.

"Look, this is, obviously, this has been an incredibly. This day. And there's not a diplomatic way to say this, but I don't know what is." She put her hand on her forehead. Her fringe bunched up over her fingers. "If you're talking to Evan Rosier, you might as well make yourself useful. Try to find out, you know, find out what happened to Benjy. Quick. Find out fast. I didn't say anything to anyone, and you owe me that."

That sounded a little like blackmail, but I reckoned I did owe her. I felt like I owed her. "I'll do everything I can."

"I don't want you to try. I want you to do it. Are you going to do it?"

I looked down at our shoes. There was a spot of blood on her toe. "I can't promise that."

"So, what, you'll just keep chit-chatting with that murderer to what, get closure about your murderer brother while his murderer friends are off murdering Benjy somewhere?"

"No. That's not what. It's not that I won't try, Emmeline, it's that he's smarter than that. He won't tell me the first thing about. Well. Anything. And besides, we don't even know he knows anything in the first place."

"So, what, you've never heard of forcing a confession? You've never heard of breaking fingers and Veritaserum and memory charms?"

"I'll do the best I can. I promise."

She shook her head. "You're not going to do anything."


End file.
